The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You and How to Get Good at It

by Kelly McGonigal

It is better to chase meaning than try to avoid discomfort.

“If you have butterflies in your stomach, invite them into your heart.” —COOPER EDENS

People who reported high levels of stress but who did not view their stress as harmful were not more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than those who reported experiencing very little stress.

“believing stress is bad for you” the fifteenth-leading cause of death in the United States, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS, and homicide.

The latest science reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger, and more successful. It helps you learn and grow. It can even inspire courage and compassion.

Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake.

important truth about stress: Stress and meaning are inextricably linked. You don’t stress out about things you don’t care about, and you can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress.

Seeing the upside of stress is not about deciding whether stress is either all good or all bad. It’s about how choosing to see the good in stress can help you meet the challenges in your life.

our physical reality is more subjective than we believe. By changing how people think about an experience, she can change what’s happening in their bodies.

The Effect You Expect Is the Effect You Get

Crum’s provocative hypothesis is that when two outcomes are possible—in this case, the health benefits of exercise or the strain of physical labor—a person’s expectations influence which outcome is more likely. She concluded that the housekeepers’ perception of their work as healthy exercise transformed its effects on their bodies. In other words, the effect you expect is the effect you get.

Crum’s study showed that expectations could alter something as concrete as how much of a hormone the cells of your gastrointestinal tract secrete.

In the same way that testosterone helps your body grow stronger from physical exercise, DHEA helps your brain grow stronger from stressful experiences. It also counters some of the effects of cortisol.

The ratio of DHEA to cortisol is called the growth index of a stress response.

Viewing stress as enhancing made it so—not in some subjective, self-reported way, but in the ratio of stress hormones produced by the participants’ adrenal glands.

Unlike a placebo, which tends to have a short-lived impact on a highly specific outcome, the consequences of a mindset snowball over time, increasing in influence and long-term impact.

how you think about aging affects health and longevity not through some mystical power of positive thinking but by influencing your goals and choices. This is a perfect example of a mindset effect.

“The process begins in a psychological way,” Walton told me, “but then it becomes sociological.”

Many problems are deeply rooted, and yet one of the themes you’ll see again and again in this book is that small shifts in mindset can trigger a cascade of changes so profound that they test the limits of what seems possible.

Asking patients to be in on the trick—by explaining how the placebo effect works—does not reduce the placebo’s effectiveness. It may even enhance the effect.

The first step is to acknowledge stress when you experience it. Simply allow yourself to notice the stress, including how it affects your body. The second step is to welcome the stress by recognizing that it’s a response to something you care about. Can you connect to the positive motivation behind the stress? What is at stake here, and why does it matter to you? The third step is to make use of the energy that stress gives you, instead of wasting that energy trying to manage your stress. What can you do right now that reflects your goals and values?

The most effective mindset interventions have three parts: 1) learning the new point of view, 2) doing an exercise that encourages you to adopt and apply the new mindset, and 3) providing an opportunity to share the idea with others.

The mindset doesn’t feel like a choice that we make; it feels like an accurate assessment of how the world works.

you probably don’t realize how that belief affects your thoughts, emotions, and actions. I call this “mindset blindness.” The solution is to practice mindset mindfulness—by

Practicing mindset mindfulness doesn’t require anything other than curiosity.

making a deliberate shift in mindset when you’re feeling stressed is even more empowering than having an automatically positive view.

In fact, one of the most promising new therapies to prevent or treat PTSD is administering doses of stress hormones.

what!?

The mismatch theory of the stress response hinges on the idea that there is only one kind of stress response.

Men who had the strongest cardiovascular reactivity to stress were also the most likely to trust and be trustworthy in the game that followed.

Unlike what most people believe, there is no one uniform physical stress response that is triggered by all stressful situations.

People who report being in a flow state—a highly enjoyable state of being completely absorbed in what you are doing—display clear signs of a challenge response.

When all you want is to talk to a friend or a loved one, that’s the stress response encouraging you to seek support.

Your heart has special receptors for oxytocin, which helps heart cells regenerate and repair from any micro-damage. When your stress response includes oxytocin, stress can literally strengthen your heart.

your stress response is extremely receptive to the effects of deliberate practice. Whatever actions you take during stress, you teach your body and brain to do spontaneously.

When you feel your body responding to stress, ask yourself which part of the stress response you need most. Do you need to fight, escape, engage, connect, find meaning, or grow?

a meaningful life is a stressful life

To the researchers’ surprise, the higher a nation’s stress index, the higher the nation’s well-being.

What are the best predictors of a meaningful life? Surprisingly, stress ranked high.

many studies show that people who have a sense of purpose live longer.

even when the stress we’re under doesn’t seem inherently meaningful, it can trigger the desire to find meaning—if not in this moment, then in the broader context of our lives.

Feeling burdened rather than uplifted by everyday duties is more a mindset than a measure of what is going on in your life.

The study’s takeaway shouldn’t be to try to reduce the so-called hassles in your life. The takeaway should be to change your relationship to the everyday experiences you perceive as hassles.

Their conclusion: Writing about values helped the students see the meaning in their lives.

It turns out that writing about your values is one of the most effective psychological interventions ever studied.

People who write about their values once, for ten minutes, show benefits months or even years later.

Research shows that reflecting on your values in moments of stress can help you cope.

The study participants were encouraged to look at the bracelet or keychain when they were feeling stressed and to think about their most important values in that moment. This added instruction helped people deal with adversity even better than a onetime writing exercise.

“What personal strengths did you bring to that moment that helped you respond to the suffering that was present?”

For health care providers, deriving meaning from their work requires reflecting on the profound privilege of being with a person who is suffering and doing their best to relieve it. Trying to defend against the suffering around them can, paradoxically, increase their risk of burnout, by removing an important source of meaning.

Embrace the relationship between suffering and meaning, rather than defend against it. Most important, create a community of fellow physicians who share and support a meaning-making mindset.