National Geographic for Disney+/Craig Parry

In the first episode of the National Geographic docuseries Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, Modupe Akinola (MBA 2001/PhDOB 2009) and the Australian actor gaze across downtown Sydney to a skyscraper in the distance, teetering over the harbor. “That’s the crane you’ll walk across,” Akinola says, pointing 900 feet up to the tower’s rooftop. A steel beam extends horizontally from the roof—squarely in the heavens. While Hemsworth has built a career avenging evil as the Norse god Thor in the Marvel movie franchise, in Limitless he plays himself, a mere mortal in search of strategies to live better and longer. Instead of a magic hammer, the actor relies on guidance from a series of experts like Akinola, an organizational psychologist and Columbia Business School professor. She’s here to help him better manage his stress. Akinola’s secret weapon is academic research: more specifically, the finding that, when used correctly, stress can actually be a force for good.

In the show, Akinola puts Hemsworth through a series of intense trials, all designed to strike fear and trigger his stress response. Meanwhile she also teaches him breathing techniques and mental reframing strategies—tools that he practices and eventually relies on to get himself across the crane. With a bachelor’s in psychology and a master’s in social psychology (also from Harvard), Akinola ordinarily studies the effects of stress in the workplace, but the lessons are 100 percent transferable: By learning how to better manage the everyday stuff, we can retrain our brain and our body to overcome stress when it matters most. Our bodies are designed for this, she says.

In a recent Zoom from her office at Columbia, Akinola suggests that popular culture has made too much of the narrative that stress is killing us. Yes, plenty of studies have documented the ways in which it can negatively affect our mental and physical health. But the truth isn’t necessarily so grim, she says. After all, stress is as natural and necessary as the air we breathe, and none of us would be here without it. When our earliest ancestors were chased by a hungry cave bear, it was the body’s adaptive response that powered the quick burst of energy that allowed for survival.

Illustration by Johanna Goodman

Illustration by Johanna Goodman

It all goes back to basic biology. When we perceive a sudden or severe threat—whether that’s a natural predator or a work presentation that you can’t afford to blow—the brain takes over and grabs the wheel. It sends the nervous system into overdrive, and cortisol floods the bloodstream. The heart races and arteries constrict, sending blood to the body’s core and away from the brain. These responses are the brain’s way of preparing the body for the worst-case scenario in a fight-or-flight situation. The real danger arises when we can’t turn it off and reset the system, Akinola says. Living in a chronic state of stress can lead to a host of dangers, from high blood pressure to a compromised immune system. The key is to understand how to make your stress work for you, so that it doesn’t work against you.

The first step is just acknowledging the presence of stress. “Think of it as a person who shows up at your home unannounced. You know it’s going to make the weekend more challenging, but you still acknowledge them and welcome them in and find a way to treat them right. Why? Because you care about them,” she explains. Similarly, situations tend to cause us anxiety when we care about the outcome. Identify the deeper cause: If an upcoming work presentation is keeping you awake at night, maybe deep down you’re worried it might derail your career and threaten your hopes of building a great life or sending your kids to college. “Just articulate that,” Akinola advises. Channeling those thoughts can help you perform your best when you’re under intense pressure.

Mindfulness strategies offer another set of powerful tools that can help rewire the brain, Akinola says. Just as our fight-or-flight response can be triggered by the outside world, our interior world also can have an effect, and we can short-circuit the system by responding positively to stimuli instead of negatively. In Limitless, Hemsworth used breathing techniques to help lower his heart rate from 142 BPM to 86, allowing him to walk across that crane. (Box breathing is one such tool: Inhale for a count of four, and hold it for four. Then exhale for four, and hold for four. Repeat.)

Elsewhere in academia, research by Associate Professor Alison Wood Brooks found that the way we talk to ourselves can make a difference, too. In her study, “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement,” people who told themselves that the butterfly feeling in their stomach was excitement instead of nervousness outperformed those who focused their efforts on trying to calm down before a performance. “Just changing the language can make it less of a reactive thing and more of a proactive experience,” Brooks notes.

Beyond these personal interventions, Akinola says organizations owe it to their employees to do more. Even in environments where people thrive on stress, “We need to do more to help people, naturally and structurally, get back to a state of homeostasis,” she says. One structural approach could be giving people flexibility over their schedules, but a better approach is to pose the question of what bothers them in the first place: “As leaders, can we get to know our people better, know what stresses them out, and try to help them? Can we talk about that?” It would be one small step in changing the dynamic of our work environments, she notes, enabling people to achieve their goals—from the heroic to the everyday stuff.

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