The common image of how successful people handle stress leans heavily on avoidance, they meditate it away, delegate it away, or simply seem immune to it. Two studies looking at what high performers actually do under real pressure tell a different story, one where stress isn’t dodged so much as deliberately reframed and specifically rehearsed for.
The clearest evidence on reframing comes from a 2013 study by Alia Crum, Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In one part of the research, the team surveyed 388 employees at a large international financial institution going through mass layoffs and restructuring, a genuinely high-pressure professional environment, and confirmed that a person’s mindset about whether stress is enhancing or debilitating functions as a distinct psychological trait, separate from how much stress someone faces or how they cope with it. In a follow-up experiment, employees were randomly assigned to watch a short video framing stress as either enhancing or debilitating, or no video at all, over the course of a week. The group shown the “stress-is-enhancing” video showed a significant drop in anxiety and depression symptoms and a significant rise in self-rated work performance, while the other two groups showed no meaningful change on either measure. A third experiment, using a standard lab stress test, found that people with a stress-is-enhancing mindset also showed more adaptive cortisol responses and a stronger desire for critical feedback under acute pressure, actively seeking the kind of input that helps them improve rather than avoiding it.
A second study helps show that this reframed relationship with stress pairs with something more concrete, specific rehearsed routines built well before the pressure hits. In a 1993 study by Daniel Gould, Robert Eklund, and Susan Jackson, published in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with all 20 members of the 1988 U.S. Olympic wrestling team about how they coped during the Seoul Games, competition about as high-stakes as it gets. The wrestlers described using four types of coping, controlling their thoughts, narrowing their focus to immediate goals, managing their environment, and regulating their emotional arousal through things like visualization. The detail most relevant to how success gets built day to day was this: coping effectiveness tracked closely with how well-rehearsed and automatic a strategy had become. Improvised coping in the moment was consistently described as far less effective than a pre-competition routine practiced so often it required no conscious thought under pressure.
Together, these two studies suggest that dealing with stress at a high level isn’t primarily about eliminating it, it’s about changing one’s relationship to it and preparing for it in advance. Crum, Salovey, and Achor’s research shows that simply shifting how stress is mentally framed, as enhancing rather than threatening, produces measurable drops in anxiety and measurable gains in performance within days. Gould, Eklund, and Jackson’s research shows that under the most extreme competitive pressure imaginable, the strategies that actually worked weren’t improvised in the moment, they were routines rehearsed until they became automatic. Between the two, handling stress at a high level looks less like natural toughness and more like two learnable habits, reframing the stress itself, and building the routine before the pressure arrives.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Crum, Salovey, and Achor’s research measured self-rated performance and short-term symptom changes over about a week, and while the mindset shift was real and significant, it doesn’t capture how durable the effect is over months or years of sustained high-pressure work. Gould, Eklund, and Jackson’s research relied on retrospective interviews with a small, specific sample of 20 elite wrestlers, valuable for its depth but not something that can be generalized numerically the way a larger survey could.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful picture of how high performers actually relate to stress. It isn’t the absence of pressure. It’s a specific mental stance toward it, paired with routines built long before the moment that needs them.