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A 2013 study asked a broad national sample of adults in the U.S to rate how much they agreed with the statement, Taking all things together, I feel my life is meaningful. The relationship between stress and meaning can be very helpful to understand. If you can change any of these conditions – by finding some meaning in it – you can reduce the harmful effects of stress. Stress is most likely to be harmful when the following conditions are present: it feels against your will, out of your control and utterly devoid of meaning. When facing a difficult or stressful situation, what should people do? It can be true that going through something stressful can make you sick or depressed, and it can also be true that the same stressful experience can ultimately make you stronger, more compassionate and more resilient over time. You have to be able to understand that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time. Psychologists have found that the ability to embrace stress requires a high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Given that life is going to be stressful, what do you gain by focusing on the fear that the reality of your life is killing you?
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We rarely get to choose the stress in our lives, and it isn’t realistic to think we can avoid stress.
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It’s about trying to balance your mindset so that you feel less overwhelmed and hopeless about the fact that your life is stressful. There is a reason stress has a bad reputation, and part of it is the evidence that chronic and traumatic stress can increase the risk of illness, depression and early mortality, among other things.Ĭhoosing to see the upside of stress isn’t about denying the fact that stress can be harmful. More importantly, changing any one of these attitudes can help you thrive in the face of ordinary stress as well as chronic or even traumatic stress. For example, when you feel your heart pounding from anxiety, you think about how your body is trying to give you the energy you need to rise to the challenge. The emerging science on stress mindsets shows that it is possible to change all of these attitudes, even if we are used to thinking of stress as harmful. The three most protective beliefs about stress are: 1) to view your body’s stress response as helpful, not debilitating – for example, to view stress as energy you can use 2) to view yourself as able to handle, and even learn and grow from, the stress in your life and 3) to view stress as something that everyone deals with, and not something that proves how uniquely screwed up you or your life is. In the course of researching the book and leading my own stress mindset interventions, I’ve discovered that the most helpful mindset toward stress goes beyond a generally positive attitude toward stress. So should we just tell ourselves that stress is good for us? In contrast, viewing stress more positively seems to encourage people to cope in ways that help them thrive, whether it’s tackling the source of stress, seeking social support or finding meaning in it. One study found that simply having the goal to avoid stress increased the long-term risk of outcomes like depression, divorce and getting fired, by increasing people’s reliance on harmful coping strategies. Viewing stress as harmful leads people to cope in ways that are less helpful, whether it’s getting drunk to “release” stress, procrastinating to avoid stress, or imagining worst-case scenarios. One reason that how you think about stress matters is because it changes how you respond to stress. The initial research on stress mindsets, which was conducted by Stanford psychology Assistant Professor Alia Crum, showed that viewing stress as a helpful part of life, rather than as harmful, is associated with better health, emotional well-being and productivity at work – even during periods of high stress. How can one cultivate a mindset to embrace stress? The Stanford News Service interviewed McGonigal, who recently published a new book, The Upside of Stress, on the subject. “Once you appreciate that going through stress makes you better at it, it can be easier to face each new challenge.” “Stress isn’t always harmful,” said Kelly McGonigal, a business school lecturer at Stanford and program developer for the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. If people actually embrace the concept of stress, it can make them stronger, smarter and happier, a Stanford expert says. Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal says that viewing stress more positively seems to encourage people to cope in ways that help them thrive.