Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old stress cure is to ‘make the first phone call, or send the first email’— and a recruiter says it lands even harder in 2026

With economic uncertainty, AI anxiety, and a brutal job market weighing on workers everywhere, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a counterintuitive theory on coping with stress—and thinks most people get it completely wrong. Back in 2001, the then-new tech billionaire, fresh off Amazon’s 1997 IPO, took to the stage at the Academy of Achievement Summit in San Antonio to lay out a take on what actually causes stress. And in his eyes, it has nothing to do with workload, grueling hours, or needing a holiday. “You can be working incredibly hard and loving it,” Bezos said. “And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed.” The culprit, Bezos argued, isn’t your workload. It’s inaction. “People get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion,” he added. “Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.” Feeling stressed? Here’s Jeff Bezos’ 25-year-old fix The fix, Bezos says, is simple—and it doesn’t require even solving the dilemma that’s making you lose sleep. You just need to do something, anything, to chip away at it. “Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over, so if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me,” Bezos explains. “What it means is there’s something that I haven’t completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it.” “As soon as I identify it and make the first phone call, or send off the first email—whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address that situation—even if it’s not solved, the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it,” he added. In other words, the relief doesn’t come from resolution. It comes from motion. And he made his point with a concrete (and