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

by Kelly McGonigal

Stress Helps You Learn and Grow The last stage of any stress response is recovery, when your body and brain return to a non-stressed state. The body relies on a pharmacy of stress hormones to help you recover. For example, cortisol and oxytocin reduce inflammation and restore balance to the autonomic nervous system.25 DHEA and nerve growth factor increase neuroplasticity so that your brain can learn from stressful experiences. Though you may have thought of stress hormones as something you need to recover from, in this case, it’s the reverse. These hormones are built into the stress response because they help you recover physically and mentally. People who release higher levels of these hormones during a stressful experience tend to bounce back faster, with less lingering distress.26 The stress recovery process isn’t instantaneous. For several hours after you have a strong stress response, the brain is rewiring itself to remember and learn from the experience. During this time, stress hormones increase activity in brain regions that support learning and memory. As your brain tries to process your experience, you may find yourself unable to stop thinking about what happened. You might feel an impulse to talk with someone about it, or to pray about it. If things went well, you might replay the experience in your mind, remembering everything you did and how it worked out. If things went poorly, you might try to understand what happened, imagine what you could have done differ...

Learning from stress