Kelly McGonigal: How to make stress your friend.
I have a confession to make,
But first, I want you to make a little confession to me.
In the past year , I want you to just rai your hand if you’ve experienced relatively little stress.
Anyone
How about a moderate amount of stress
Who has experienced a lot of stress启明星学校
Me too.
But that is not my confession.吊袜带
My confession is this: I am a health psychologist and my mission is to help people be happi
er 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 teaching people, stress makes you sick.
It increas the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovasclar dia.salay
Basically, I’ve turned stress into the enemy.eskape
But I have changed my mind about stress, and today ,I want to change yours.
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”
They also asked,
“Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health”
And then they ud public death records to find out who died.
Okay!
Some bad news first
People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent incread risk of dying.
But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die.
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In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study including people who had relatively little stress.
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Now the rearchers 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.
That is over 20,000 deaths a year.
Now , if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15ickth largest cau of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.
You can e why this study freaked me out.
Here I’ve been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
So this study got me wondering:
Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier
And here the science says yes.
When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s respon to stress.
Now to explain how this works,
I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out.
It’s called the social stress test.
You come into the laboratory, and you’re told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weakness to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback like
crowthis.
Now that you’re sufficiently demoralized, time for part two a math test.
And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it.
Now we’re going to all do this together.
It’s going to be fun.
For me.
Okay.
I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of ven.
You’re going to do this out loud as fast as you can, starting with 996.
Go !
Go faster.
Faster plea.
You’re going too slow.
Stop, stop, stop, stop.
That guy made a mistake.
We are going to have to start all over again.
You’re not very good at this, are you
Okay, so you get the idea.
Now, if you were actually in this study, you’d probably be a little stresd out.
Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat.
And normally, we interpret the physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren’t copi
ng very well with the pressure.
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 respon as helpful.
