Stress Isn’t Killing You

30,000 adults were asked two simple questions.

• How much stress did you experience in the last year?

• Do you believe stress is harmful to your health?

Eight years later the researchers looked at public records to see who out of the 30,000 people had passed-away. As you might expect, those that reported high-levels of stress were 43% more likely to die.

Here’s where it gets interesting though.

This was only if they believed that stress was harmful to their health.

If they thought stress was normal, they were less likely to die than people who thought stress was bad for their health.

This was true even if the ‘stress is good’ group experienced much higher levels of actual stress than the ‘stress is bad’ group.

The research showed that if you have a lot of stress in your life but believe it to be OK, then you are more likely to live longer than someone who has very low stress but also believes it to be harmful.

Since this research was conducted in 1998, study after study has confirmed the same results.

Most forms of stress are not bad for you. In fact, stress is generally good for you.

It’s what you believe about it that causes problems.

Why do you believe stress is bad for you?

Hans Selye was a prominent Hungarian endocrinologist working in the 1930s. He noticed that rats in terrible conditions were more likely to become unwell and die. Without going into detail, Selye continued experimenting. He used the generic word ‘stress’ to describe the awful experiences these rats endured.

Because Selye stated that it was stress that made the rats sick, it was assumed that all stress, regardless of how intense or prolonged it was, had the same negative impact on health.

Even now, most of what you read and hear about stress’s harmful effects comes from studies of pathologically-stressed lab rats.

But human stress is not the same.

Your body does not respond to the challenges of life in the same way these poor rats did to their extreme conditions.

You produce a different cocktail and ratio of stress hormones depending on the type of stress, the context of the stress (what it means to you) and how you believe stress affects you. These hormones are good for you.  

The Truth About Stress

For example - have you ever felt compelled to reach out to a partner or friend during a rough day? That’s the work of oxytocin, a hormone produced during your stress response that promotes social connection and bonding. It also relaxes the blood vessels around your heart - it’s cardio-protective. Have you ever heard that stress is good for your heart? I doubt it. But in this case, it absolutely is.

How about learning from stressful situations? Have you ever experienced a heightened sense of alertness during the build-up to a deadline, presentation, exam or sporting event? Along with cortisol, that’s DHEA, a hormone produced during stress that encourages the growth and connection of new brain cells. It helps you learn.

Stress helps you rise to the challenge. It gives you energy and heightens your focus. It helps you learn, improves your heart-health and deepens your social connections. This is all confirmed by science.

“Most people believe that the body’s stress response is uniformly harmful. From the conventional point of view, your body betrays you every time your hands get clammy, your heart races, or your stomach twists into knots. To protect your health and happiness, the thinking goes, your number one priority should be to shut down the stress response.”

 Dr Kelly McGonigal

This is exactly the advice I’ve been following and giving most of my career.

I was wrong.

Here are 4 ways to transform your relationship to stress and increase your likelihood of living a longer, happier, healthier life.

1 - Choose Excitement Over Anxiety

Have you noticed how similarly these two emotions affect your body? Both increase your heart and breathing rate. They both make your palms sweat. They make you more attentive. They give you butterflies-in-your-stomach. They create muscle tension.

They’re both preparing your body to perform for something you consider to be important.

Your increased heart and breathing rate is getting more blood and oxygen to your brain and muscles so you can think clearer and move faster. Those butterflies are reminders that you care about what you’re about to engage with. The tension in your muscles is your body preparing for action.

Invite the changes in your body in the same way a race-car driver would appreciate the sound of their engine revving as they accelerate away from the starting-line. You need that energy to perform and win.

We tend to invite excitement as a good thing while trying to block anxiety as detrimental. We open-up to excitement and close-down anxiety.

They’re the same thing - you just talk to yourself differently about them.

Re-label anxiety as excitement.

2 - Find The Meaning

Pursuing goals that align with your purpose requires growth. Stress is a natural and inevitable part of growth. A meaningful life is therefore a partly stressful life.

Find meaning in the stress in your life. Write out why the role, relationship, activity or goal that has associated stress is important to you.

Now those small tasks like making your child a packed-lunch, dealing with an unnecessarily irate customer, going to an intimidating social event, going for a run on a cold winter morning, commuting to work - stops being a hassle and turns into a vital step on your journey to personal transformation.

3 - Connect With Others

Listen to and acknowledge your feelings - anger, sadness, frustration, self-doubt, disappointment. Know that this temporary suffering is part of the human condition. Everyone in the world has experienced something like you are feeling. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people feeling similar emotions to you in the world right now. What would you wish for those same people? What would you do to help them? What would it feel like to overcome the suffering?

You just upped your levels of oxytocin. By expanding your personal suffering to embrace others, you reminded yourself that you are not alone.

That’s an extremely powerful reframe for your wellbeing.

4 - Recognise your growth

What did you learn about yourself through hardship, loss or trauma?

Whilst it’s unlikely you’d wish to go through that again, you almost certainly grew in some way.

What did it reveal about how capable you thought you were?

Did you find strength in a way you could never have imagined otherwise?

Did you find a new appreciation for life?

Did you develop new wisdom and perspectives?

Do you prioritise time for things that you realised are more important now?

Did you connect deeper with family, friends or your community?

Have you changed goals or life direction because of it?

Stress is part of a meaningful life. It is a myth that the stress response (often called the flight or flight response) is redundant in modern life.

“If you think that the body’s response to stress is always fight-or-flight, then the stress response begins to look like evolutionary baggage. This is what many scientists argue.”

 Dr Kelly McGonigal

Your stress response is not something to be avoided. For the vast majority of the time it is part of your innate biology to be embraced and cherished.

People have been searching for an elixir that will prolong their life for millennia.

Trusting your stress response is the only remedy that has been endorsed by science.