Stress is a word that we have become very familiar with. Everyone around us seems to be going through some kind of stress ranging from familial to work-related. No one likes to stress, everyone thinks it’s the enemy. But that may not be the case anymore.
Well, like most other human beings on earth, I too believed the same, until I heard Psychologist Kelly McGonigal speak about how stress can actually be good for you. She said “My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I’ve been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I’ve been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I’ve turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.”
She spoke about a study that was done in the United States, which followed 30,000 adults for eight years. Here is what she told us about the findings of the study:
“People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful to your health. 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. 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.”
Hence, the study is pretty self-explanatory. It is your mind that has the real power. The thought that stress is bad for you puts you at a greater risk of dying prematurely than stress itself! The belief itself became the 15th largest cause of death in the US, beating skin cancer and homicide! So it is no joke when it is said that “It is all in the mind.” Changing the way you think about stress changes the way your body reacts to it as well, and this is proven now!
Remember the last time you took a test and you looked up at the clock only to realize that you have only 5 minutes left and you won’t be able to finish the paper? Your heart started pounding, you started sweating and feeling anxious. This was the way of your body of telling you that you’re in a stressful situation.
Kelly asked, “But 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.”
The participants who were encouraged to view their stress response as a sign of gearing up to handle the situation had actual physiological change. Their blood vessels instead of constricting stayed relaxed. Their cardiovascular response looked like how it would look in moments of happiness and courage.
“Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.”, concluded the health psychologist.
So, spiritualists and scientists have reached an agreement that the real seat of power is indeed in the way you view things. Next time when you feel stressed, instead of undermining yourself by thinking ‘ I cannot do this’ to handle the pressure, think ‘I can do this and I can overcome this’
The thought can actually make your body believe your mind for real, in turn helping it to respond better to the situation.
When asked, “A stressful job and a non-stressful job, which one to choose?”, Kelly gave a profound reply, which I believe we would all agree upon, “Chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that’s really the best way to make decisions, is going after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.”
Trust in yourself. It is you who decides what can affect you, positively or negatively.
So, think wisely because what you think is what you will be!
