# Stress for Success by Loehr & McCormack: Why I Chase the Anxiety

> Source: [https://icharles.com/articles/stress-for-success-by-loehr-and-mccormack-why-i-chase-the-anxiety](https://icharles.com/articles/stress-for-success-by-loehr-and-mccormack-why-i-chase-the-anxiety) (canonical)
> Author: Chuck — iCharles, https://icharles.com
> Published: 2019-04-22 · Updated: 2026-07-07

## Why I Picked This Up

My brother is the CEO of the Americas for one of the big German banks — you can guess which one. I saw him at Easter and he told me how stressed he's been. I love the guy, but it got me thinking about what "stressed" actually means, because I don't think most people are using the word right. That's what sent me back to this book. It's old — written in the early 90s, back when the big flex was a car phone — but the framework in it is one of the most useful things I've read all year.

## Stress Isn't the Problem — Your Response Is

The whole book comes down to one idea: life is a challenge and a response. That's it. Every era, every species, every business — a challenge shows up, and something responds to it. Back in the day the challenge was "I'm hungry" or "something's hunting me." Now it's a bad market, a breakup, a bad diagnosis, a tough conversation. We've started labeling all of it "stress," like it's automatically bad. It's not. It's just a challenge waiting on your response.

Here's my own version of this: I don't like compliments. I like when someone tells me I *can't* do something. That's a challenge landing on me, and my response is to go prove them wrong. Same input, different response, completely different outcome. That's the whole book in one example.

## Stress Is Fuel, Not Failure

Stress on a muscle builds the muscle. Stress on you builds your capacity to handle the next, harder thing. Coddle someone their whole life and the first real challenge breaks them. There's a stat in the book that stuck with me — the countries with the highest stress also had the highest happiness and GDP growth. Not despite the stress. Because of it. Happiness isn't handed to you from the outside; it comes from overcoming something or just being present in the moment. No challenge, no growth, no meaning.

What's actually bad is *distress* — staying stuck in a stressful state with no resolution. Cortisol just drips into your system all day because there's no off-switch: Instagram, email, calls, no downtime. Stress itself isn't the villain. Never turning it off is.

## Reorder Your Life Around the Next Step, Not the Big Goal

One line I keep coming back to: reorder your life so health, happiness, and productivity are actually obtainable — today, not in five years. Wanting to get married someday is a goal, not an action. Going and talking to someone today is the action. I apply this directly: instead of sitting with the big five-year target, I ask what's the smallest, least comfortable step I can take today toward it, and I do that first.

## Get Comfortable With Change, Because It's the Only Constant

In real estate, there's always a new threat — tech trying to cut out brokers, apps trying to disintermediate commissions. I can't walk into their board meetings and tell them to stop. That's outside my control. What I can control is my response: adapt, add value they can't replicate, keep evolving. The book calls this being a "business athlete" — you don't fight change, you build the capacity to absorb it.

## Everything Is Interconnected

This is the one that changed my daily behavior most. Health, business, relationships, sleep — it's all one system. I can't wake up cranky about my family and expect to make good calls at work. That's why rituals matter, and why I now protect them even when it's inconvenient. My sister flew 30 hours home for Easter and asked me to sleep over instead of driving back to the city for the gym in the morning. The easy route was to stay. I didn't, because the ritual is the point — not the one exception.

## Anxiety Is My Signal Now

The biggest shift: I feel anxiety when I'm *not* pushing myself, not when I am. Every three or four months I get that itch — it means I've plateaued, or I've conquered whatever used to be hard and it's only 1% better now. That's how triathlon training happened. That's how I finally admitted I needed to start dating instead of avoiding it. Emotions run the show, and most mornings mine tell me to skip the gym or sleep in. The move — straight from the book, and something the Dalai Lama apparently does with meditation — is to do the opposite of what the emotion wants. The less I feel like it, the more I need it.

## Who Should Read This

Anyone who uses "I'm stressed" as a reason to shrink instead of grow. If you run a business, train for anything hard, or just feel like your life has stalled — this book gives you the reframe: stress isn't happening to you, it's building you. Old book, still exactly right.