I once asked a Navy fighter pilot whether he felt stressed when he was landing his little airplane in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, onto a tiny aircraft carrier tossing around in the ocean way below.

We were sitting on an airplane—a 727, I believe, heading from Washington D.C. to Detroit, and I was looking for the air sickness bag when he kindly handed me his and said: “Don’t worry, I’m a pilot.” When I took the bag with relief, he added, “But I couldn’t do anything if something happened to this plane—I fly F14s off of aircraft carriers.”

That’s when I asked him the question about stress. His answer: “We feel all those things—our heart beating fast, sweaty, feeling like running to the bathroom, but we’re taught to make our stress response work for us.”

In fact, he was right. The brain’s stress response is a very sensitive indicator that something is amiss and that you need to change course. The stress center is the same part of the brain that gives you the energy to do that—to fight or flee and feel exhilarated when you succeed.

Whether you feel stressed or exhilarated depends on two things: the demands placed on you and the amount of control you have over the situation.

If you are in a high-demand situation, when everything happening in the world around you is out of your control, you feel helpless and stressed. When you are in a low-demand, low-control situation, you feel bored. When you are in a high-demand, high-control situation, you feel exhilarated. This is the principle behind many video games.

In fact,........

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