What is the best way to handle a stressful situation? Stress is the emotional reaction you get to some perceived threat in the environment. In the workplace, stress can come from the prospect that a project you are working on might fail, that a colleague might be upset at you, or that a client may be on the verge of leaving. It might also involve your personal circumstances: the belief that your boss doesn’t like you, that you’re letting your colleagues down, or that you’re on the verge of losing your job.

A common reaction to stress is rumination, which is a repeated cycle of thoughts around a threat. This cycle of thoughts keeps your concerns top of mind, which then maintains your stress level. Indeed, one reason that mindfulness meditation techniques can help to reduce stress is that they can allow you to better recognize and ultimately quiet a cycle of rumination.

But, this approach assumes that rumination is always bad. There can be value in thinking about a stressful situation before trying to calm your cycle of thoughts.

You want to understand the source of your stress. That is, you may feel that pit in your stomach, the sweats, and the tension without really understanding what it is that’s stressing you out. Rather than just letting your thoughts flow without control, pull out a pen and some paper and write down the things that you are concerned may go wrong.

That list has two benefits. By writing it down, your brain knows that you have a place you can go to look at the sources of stress, so it is less likely to keep reminding you in the form of intrusive thoughts about your concerns. Second, that list is something you can begin to go through more systematically.

So, take the list and start classifying the threats you identified. There are likely to be four categories of things on your list:

• Items that are legitimate threats, but you can’t do anything about them (like the state of the economy, or a decision that’s in the hands of a client)
• Items that are really not that big a deal after all
• Items where you need more information to know whether they are a threat
• Items that are legitimate threats, and you don’t have a clear course of action

The first two of these items are ones where you should engage in calming yourself, because further thinking won’t help much. If something isn’t that big of a deal, it isn’t worth worrying about. If it is completely out of your control, then you have to let the world turn until you get more information from the people around you.

The third—needing more information—is one where you need to focus on how to reduce the uncertainty about the threat. That may mean talking to other people who have knowledge you need. If you’re worried about your performance, for example, set up a meeting with your supervisor to express your concerns. You may be well-founded in the belief that there is more you should be doing, but there’s also a possibility that you’re doing a great job despite your concerns.

Often, people shy away from getting information to reduce uncertainty. When there is potential bad news on the horizon, we often want to hold out hope that there is nothing wrong. As soon as you find out the answer, you can no longer hold onto the illusion that all is well. But, the short-term bliss of ignorance is really outweighed by the ability to start planning for the future if there is a real problem. And if there isn’t a problem, then you would have spent time being stressed for no reason.

Finally, the legitimate and unresolved threats are the ones where giving yourself some chance to think through what to do can be helpful. It is still worth being systematic here and writing down ideas, plans, and resources that will help you to address the concern. But, you can allow rumination to work for you in this case, because there is benefit to elaborating different solutions.

Just as you did with the elaboration of the sources of stress, make sure you write down your ideas for the path forward. In the moment of generating ideas to fix a problem, it can be hard to evaluate which ones will be most likely to be effective. The stress may lead you to prefer simple solutions that address a short-term aspect of a problem rather than a course of action that may attack the root. Coming back to that list later is a great way to give a more evenhanded ranking of the ideas you have generated. In addition, you can share that list with colleagues to get their input, which might spark further suggestions.