How you think about stress matters
How you think about stress matters
Source: How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal | TEDWomen2013 | (Watch 14 min)
Contributor: Selena Garcia
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“The harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage.” - Kelly McGonigal
Do you worry about feeling stressed because you've been told it's not good for your health? Well, here's something for ya—how you think about stress matters.
This is not an annoying "just think positive" talk. It is how "research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case."
There's some fascinating information here to ponder, or better yet try! Check out the full talk.
“People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress” - Kelly McGonigal
(1:12) “Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"
(2:02) “People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.”
(2:16) “Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.”
(5:04) “What if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.”
WATCH HERE. (14 min)
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