My last blog post
focused on the book When the Body Says No, which largely regarded stress as a
problem: something to avoid or manage, particularly given its potential
negative impact on physical health. The book also explored the idea that our past traumas
can make us more susceptible to the adverse impacts of
stress, which makes its management all the more challenging.
Kelly McGonigal is the author of the stress-focused book I am highlighting in this blog: The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You, and How to get Good at It. She used to view stress as something to avoid, reduce, and or manage, given its role in illness and premature aging. For years, as a health psychologist, she delivered the “stress is a problem to be fixed” message in courses she taught and articles/books she wrote.
But she began rethinking stress when she encountered new research. In 1998, 30,000 US adults were asked how much stress they’d experienced in the last year and whether or not they believed stress was harmful to their health. Eight years later, researchers investigated who among this 30,000 had died. The bad news was that high levels of reported stress increased the risk of dying by 43 percent. But—and this is what really got her attention—the increased risk only applied to people who also believed stress was harming their health.
People who reported high levels of stress but did not view their stress as harmful were not more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest level of death of any group in the study, even lower than those participants who reported experiencing very little stress. In the end, the researchers concluded that it wasn’t stress alone that was killing people; it was the combination of stress and the belief that stress was harmful. To highlight this concept, McGonigal shares a wide range of research studies to show how various stress mindset interventions and related exercises work, as well as their encouraging success rates.
The author emphasizes, though, that even if you’re able to shift how you think about stress, you will still encounter stress in your everyday life. In fact, stress goes hand-in-hand with a happy and meaningful life. She says that people who are busier tend to be happier (although I think there are some limits to this, as well as caveats around the nature of that busyness and individual tolerances), and people with a sense of purpose tend to live longer. So, stress is often not a sign that something’s wrong with your life; it’s frequently a sign that you’re meaningfully engaged with things and people you care about.
While Part 1 of the book focuses on reframing beliefs about the harmfulness of stress, Part 2 offers strategies for transforming real-life stress/stressors into useful resources for effective living. These strategies fall into three categories:
- Change threats into challenges: Manage your perceptions and reactions so you trigger a “Challenge Response” when moving through stressful times (instead of the Flight-or-Flight response), and convert anxiety to excitement/energy. It can be easier said than done but the book provides scenarios of what this looks like.
- Build resilience through social connections. Learn the steps and interventions you can use to activate a “Tend-and-Befriend” response (instead of retreating into isolation, selfish, and or aggressive behaviours). This triggers brain activities that make you more social, brave, and cognitively sharp as you cope with stressors/challenges.
- Grow from adversity. Very few seek out adversity, yet it’s an inevitable part of life. While not denying hard times, there are still ways to make the most of a bad situation, and use that situation to recognize and activate individual strengths, values, and other helpful internal responses.
The book provides ample examples are how these strategies can be implemented amidst challenging life situations, together with the research that supports them. Again, the message is not that we deny or ignore stressful situations, but, given that they will happen, how can we respond in ways that might be more helpful than mindlessly/habitually reacting. Even if we have limited control over a stressful situation, we may still have some control over how we respond.
I’ve read many books and articles on stress and stress management, so why has this particular book stayed on my bookshelf over the years? I think it’s because, like the author, the results of the research she presents upended everything I had previously known and assumed about how stress works. It seemed to indicate that there was room to rethink the dangers of stress, and to reshape/possibly control (to some degree at least) its negative impacts on mind and body.
As we move into the fall: a time of recommitting to learning, this book is a powerful reminder that information/research is always evolving. That’s an exciting idea, and it challenges me to keep my mind open to ever-growing developments in knowledge. That said, with new information being created at a faster and faster pace, and offered via a growing number of access points, it’s also a time to be discerning about information quality, and the agendas and credentials of its messengers. Caveat emptor—let the information consumer beware.
