stress management blake

「The essence of "Stress Management Black" is the "Dynamic Stress Regulation Framework" proposed by American organizational behaviorist Blake McCarthy in 2019 - the core is to overturn the common misunderstanding that "stress must be cleared", and advocates regulating stress values ​​in the "optimal performance range" based on individual tolerance thresholds and scene attributes. It is currently one of the most popular stress management tools in the EAP projects of the top 50 companies in the world. Third-party research shows that its practical effectiveness for the workplace population is 27 percentage points higher than the traditional mindfulness-based stress reduction method.

The first time I came into contact with this method was at ByteDance's internal EAP training last year. At that time, the e-commerce team had just taken over the 618 Big Sale project. A young girl in the team who worked in user operations got off work at 2 a.m. every day for three consecutive weeks. She squatted in the tea room and cried and submitted her resignation. HR did not directly grant her a long leave, nor did she give her the chicken soup of "young people should bear more pressure", but made her do a half-hour Black framework stress assessment. Her stress tolerance threshold was measured to be 37-62 points (out of 100, below 37 she would lack motivation, and above 62 she would enter the emotional breakdown range). At that time, her self-assessed stress value had reached 89. In the end, the team did not directly reduce her core workload, but only gave her 1 Three non-core cross-department collaborations among the two tasks were transferred to the intern, and the weight of the "cross-department collaboration completion rate" in her OKR was reduced from 30% to 10%. A week later, her stress level dropped back to 58, and her personal output that week was 32% higher than under high pressure.

However, this method is not a panacea. Since its introduction, there have been continuous doubts from academia and industry. The traditional mindfulness research school has always criticized Black's framework for being "too utilitarian", completely binding stress and performance, and ignoring the rationality of emotions themselves. A paper released by the Mindfulness Research Center of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University in 2022 shows that this method is only 42% friendly for creative positions. For groups such as designers, screenwriters, and content creators who need emotional fluctuations to trigger inspiration, forcing pressure to the so-called optimal range will wear away their perception, and the content produced will be soulless assembly line products. Many domestic EAP practitioners have also complained about the implementation bug of this method: the threshold test relies entirely on individual self-reporting. Many workplace people are afraid of leaving the impression of "poor stress tolerance" to their bosses, so they will deliberately lower the stress values ​​they report. The final test results are all in the "normal range", but the real emotional problems are covered up. In the past, some Internet companies included the stress assessment results in employee assessments, and finally forced everyone to collectively conceal the report, which turned the entire EAP project into a decoration.

Interestingly, Black himself came up with this framework in order to combat the pathological workplace culture of “taking pressure as assessment”. He used to work as a consultant at McKinsey. After working on three cross-border mergers and acquisitions projects, he got severe herpes zoster. The doctor asked him to resign immediately to recuperate. He refused to put down the projects he was working on, so he read dozens of stress research papers and figured out this dynamic adjustment method. Now the consulting company he owns clearly stipulates that only he and the EAP specialist can see the employees' stress assessment results, and department heads cannot touch them, because he is afraid that this set of tools will be misused as a means for PUA employees.

I've been using it myself for almost two years, but I still don't quite live up to his standards. When writing in-depth industry manuscripts, I would deliberately raise the stress level to over 70, drink a glass of iced American wine, and stare at the deadline while writing. The efficiency was several times higher than slowly grinding the manuscript. If I really had to adjust it to the optimal range of around 50 as he said, I would not be able to finish a thousand words in one afternoon. A friend of mine who is a game original artist is even more exaggerated. Her tolerance threshold measured by herself is actually 60-85. When the pressure is low, she cannot draw a tense character at all. Instead, she is inspired every time when the deadline is approaching, and the drawings she produces are rated S-level by Party A every time.

To put it bluntly, "Stress Management Black" essentially gives ordinary people a ruler to measure their own status, rather than a set of standard answers that must be followed. You don’t have to follow the blogger to practice mindfulness for two hours to clear your stress, nor do you have to compete with your colleagues who has stayed up more late at night. It’s like adjusting the sugar content of milk tea. Some people like full sugar and some people like sugar-free. As long as you feel comfortable drinking it and can still have the energy to work, that is the stress level that is most suitable for you. As for those bosses who hold the "stress resistance" PUA, you can dump Black's paper on them - the inventors themselves know that pressure that exceeds the threshold is of no use except to wear down the body.