
What if accepting and owning our stress and anxiety can produce positive results in our lives?
What if worries and fears can help us be more confident, powerful and productive?
What if pushing back on the long-held mantra of “following our instincts” might lead us closer to achieving success and fulfillment?
For the past 15 years, Rebecca Heiss, a professional speaker, author, educator, entrepreneur and stress physiologist with a PhD in evolutionary biology, has been on a “fear-less” mission to challenge the way we view stress energy.
Heiss is the author of Springboard and Instinct and founder and CEO of the leadership 360-review mobile application, icueity.
She will bring her message on how rewiring our brains can lead to lasting change as the keynote speaker for UCHealth’s signature women’s health event, evrē, which takes place March 8 in Denver.
Pronounced “every,” the event aims to help all women lead healthier lives. (Learn more about evrē and sign up to attend.)
Heiss shares her expertise with UCHealth Today, as she delves into how stress can be an important component in the recipe to finding joy and purpose in our life. (Her answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Q: How do women deal with stress differently than men?
Heiss: This is fascinating. As part of my research, one of the things that stuck out was women having significantly more stress than men and how differently we handle it.
Women are much more likely to reach out and connect with other women. We reach out to other people, to friends and to family to create connections with one another as one of the best ways to manage stress.
So even though we have more stress, women are much better at handling it.
Q: Talk a little about why ‘trusting our instincts’ sometimes gets in the way of reaching our life goals.
Heiss: In the past, we had to rely on our fight, flight or freeze instincts to keep us safe. But now, some of our fears prevent us from raising our hands, from standing up, from going forward, from taking risks that I would call “good risks.” I am talking about situations that are not life and death but about pursuing passions and dreams. I want women to raise their hand and say, “I want that promotion,” or “I deserve to be paid more,” or “I want more out of life.”
And every one of our instincts is going to pull us back to say, “Don’t do that! Because if you do, you’re not going to be well-liked,” or “You might fail,” or “You’re going to create a competition among other women.”
I’m not proud of this, but as women, our first instinct is to look around the room and say, “These are my competitors. She’s younger. She’s prettier. She’s got this.” Rather than, “These are my allies.”
The more we can be aware of these subconscious instincts that we have, the more we can cognitively process them and move through them and say, “This isn’t a tiger, this situation isn’t going to kill me and eat me, and these old stories about other women are no longer true or productive.”
We can push ourselves forward and find a way to brag about other women and support them so we can all rise together.
It requires us to outsmart our instincts.
Q: What can women do to work toward this shift in thinking?
Heiss: There’s no quick fix. Unfortunately, our brains just don’t work like that. This is an ongoing process, and we should be consciously training ourselves, working through some exercises every day, and questioning ourselves:
- Why do I think like that?
- What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen?
- What’s the best thing that could happen?
- Why do I feel this way about a particular person?
We can easily fall into instinct traps, so the more we practice curiosity, the more natural it becomes.
I talk a lot about our stress response, and we all have a singular stress response: A pounding heart and adrenaline rush whether we’re getting chased by a tiger or we have 20 emails that arrive in our inbox.
Instead, let’s think about how to use this energy to push toward something rather than away from it. Our instincts will want us to avoid experiences that could bring failure and rejection, but we need to practice overriding and overwriting those instincts and move forward.
For instance, “I had a stress response, and I didn’t die today.”
Our brain records that, and we become faster and faster at this process. We take baby steps at first, and then each day, small things lead to bigger things.
Q: How do we talk about changing the way women deal with stress without it adding more stress to their lives?
Heiss: It’s reframing how we interpret stress, and it begins really at the heart of how we see stress because stress can be enabling and disabling. But stress can also point us to a purpose. If you’re feeling stressed, it means that you’re sensing something that’s valuable, something that’s purpose-driven, something that’s meaningful.
I often ask people to think about a project or an accomplishment that they’re most proud of and then go back in time to when they were in the middle of that project and to how stressed they were at that moment.
It’s not about doing more, it’s about fearing less and telling ourselves: “I don’t have to fear this, I can get curious in this moment and channel that energy in a positive way to reach my goals rather than move further away from them.”
Q: What do you mean when you talk about being ‘fear-less’?
Heiss: Being “fear-less” is not about having no fear. It’s about being terrified and doing it anyway. It’s about recognizing that when we take the fear out of stress, when we stop labeling stress as “good” or “bad,” we can fear it a little bit less. It’s about dealing with a new situation that may make us uncomfortable, and instead of fearing it, we can get curious about it and make room for more.
And when we make room for more, we take a cognitive pause to say, “Do I need to have fear in this moment?”
Instead of reverting to our instinctual response, we can say, “OK, I’m still scared, but I can take action in this moment and know that I can grow and, if nothing else, learn from whatever I’m about to do.”

Q: How do you own your fear?
Heiss: I really try to practice what I preach. People ask me all the time, “How are you so fear-less?” I’m not. I’m scared every single day, but I ask myself the same questions that I ask other people.
- It’s not a tiger, is it?
- Is this meaningful to me?
- If it is, where then do I want to point my energy?
I am going to have joy in the moment in trying to accomplish new things. I might not be able to succeed at everything I attempt, but fear is not going to stop me from trying.
Q: What are simple concrete steps women can take to recognize and overcome fear?
Heiss: The most fearful thing is not taking a step.
It’s that cost of inaction, those regrets, and always wondering what could have happened that produce real fear for me.
Whereas if we’re willing to take that small step, it builds momentum. Just start a little bit of something. If you want to write a book, commit to writing one sentence and then see what it triggers in your brain. A little stress? Maybe, but along with it, a dopamine hit, a happy hormone that can be addicting, and we want more of it.
If we take these steps, they build and build, and suddenly, we’ve written a few paragraphs that turn into pages that turn into chapters. Your brain hates to have unfinished things, so when we start a little, even in the wrong direction, we’ll adjust, we’ll move, we’ll take another trajectory and eventually get closer to our goal.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Heiss: I would have said stop playing sick, stop playing safe and stop taking yourself so seriously. You’re going to figure it out whether you fail, whether you get rejected, just go do it.
You have one wild and precious life, and you must live it first, for yourself. We are so often trying to please our parents, our partners, our bosses, our friends, and we forget about pleasing ourselves.
So I probably would tell my younger self, “Hey, get to know yourself. And really, really trust her, take care of her, love her.”

Q: Any words of wisdom for women as we embrace a new year?
Heiss: Take the time to look at your past year and at the moments when you were having the most joy in your life.
- Who was with you?
- What actions were you taking?
- What was your environment that you were immersed in?
Make the time this year to put more of those moments into your life. Schedule them. Because life is going to plan itself for us while we’re busy being busy.
And if we’re not intentional about the way we find joy, love, laughter, companionship and the things that bring us the most pleasure, we’ll quickly find ourselves year after year, getting less and less of that, so be intentional about holding space for those things.