Most of us believe the body’s stress response is uniformly harmful and stress hormones, like cortisol, are seen as toxins we need to eliminate from our lives.
Despite the overwhelmingly accepted idea that stress is harmful for us, increasingly studies about stress tells a very different story.
As health psychologist, Kelly McGonigal summarises in her best-selling book, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good For Youand How to Get Good At It:
“Stress increases the risk of health problems, except when people regularly give back to their communities. Stress increases the risk of dying, except when people have a sense of purpose. Stress increases the risk of depression, except when people see a benefit in their struggles. Stress is paralyzing, except when people perceive themselves as capable. Stress is debilitating, except when it helps you perform. Stress makes people selfish, except when it makes them altruistic.”
How can this possibly work? Most of us believe the body’s stress response is uniformly harmful and stress hormones, like cortisol, are seen as toxins we need to eliminate from our lives. Every time we feel our heart racing, our breath shorten, or our stomach twist into knots, we think our number one priority should be to shut down this stress response. When we believe stress should be avoided, each time something we care about is at stake, our fight-or- flight response is triggered creating a rush of fearful energy and motivation that primes us for self-defense, and makes us vigilant for signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle where our heightened attention to what’s going wrong fills us with self-doubt and leaves us with higher levels of cortisol, which can be associated with impaired immune function and depression.
But it turns out that our bodies don’t just have one response to stressful situations. What if your pounding heart or quickened breath was your body’s way of giving you more energy and strength? What if the butterflies in your stomach were a sign that you’re close to something you want? What if your body was providing you with all the resources you need to rise to a challenge?
When we believe stress should be embraced, we’re able to acknowledge that what’s at stake is meaningful to us triggering our challenge response and fuelling us with feelings of confidence, power, and a willingness to learn. By embracing our anxiety so that we feel safe, we’re able to harness the powerful mix of endorphins, adrenaline, testosterone, and dopamine that can come with any stress response, so we can take action and rise to the challenge.
As a result, McGonigal reports that during business negotiations, a challenge response leads to more effective sharing and withholding of information, as well as smarter decision- making. Students with a challenge response score higher on exams, and athletes perform better in competitions. Surgeons show better focus and ne motor skills. When faced with engine failure during a flight simulation, pilots make better use of plane data and have safer landings.
Finally, your stress response doesn’t just give you energy, in many situations it’s what motivates you to protect the people and communities you care about and importantly gives you the courage to do so. Our instinct for social connection is every bit as strong as our instinct for survival, so while it’s true that a fight-or-flight stress response may make us more aggressive or withdrawn, it’s also true that a tend-and-befriend stress response can make us more caring.
When we care for others in moments of stress, McGonigal explains that it changes our biochemistry by: Increasing our levels of oxytocin to inhibit the fear centres of our brain and improve our feelings of empathy, trust, and connection; releasing dopamine which helps us to feel more motivated and optimistic about our ability to do something meaningful; and activating the neurotransmitter serotonin which enhances our perception, intuition and self-control to ensure our actions have the biggest positive impact.
In short, helping others when we feel stressed can transform fear into bravery, and powerlessness into optimism. It also helps to head off our defeat response to stress that causes us to withdraw, lose motivation and any desire to connect with others when we feel repeatedly victimized, beaten by our circumstances or rejected by people who matter to us. When we believe that stress is an opportunity to connect with others, rather than to escape life, it fuels us with hope and seems to protect us against the harmful effects of stress on our physical health.
For example, McGonigal notes people who volunteer after a natural disaster report feeling more optimistic and energised and less overwhelmed by the stress in their life. Taking care of others after the death of a spouse has been found to reduce depression. Becoming a peer counsellor appears to help relieve pain, disability, and depression among people living with chronic pain. And after enduring a life-threatening health crisis, people who volunteer experience more hope, less depression and a great sense of purpose.
Getting comfortably uncomfortable
So how can you harness stress to support your resilience and grit? Rather than debating if stress is good or bad for us, McGonigal suggests the question we should be asking ourselves is: “Do I believe I have the capacity to transform stress into something good?” Try to take a moment right now and think about a significant turning point in your life that helped you to make positive changes, gave you a newly found sense of purpose, or led to important personal growth. Would you describe this period as stressful?
Stress in itself appears neither good nor bad. And while our genes and life histories can influence our stress response, it seems that it’s our beliefs about stress that most shape the actions we’re willing to take and the outcomes we’re most likely to get. So what if instead of trying to get rid of stress, we experimented with embracing it?
McGonigal argues that when we believe that stress is harmful and something to avoid we generally feel that what’s unfolding is utterly meaningless and against our will, that we’re inadequate to respond and have a tendency to isolate and protect ourselves from others. We’re left feeling afraid, full of self-doubt, and incredibly lonely. But when we believe that stress is best accepted and embraced, we feel that what’s unfolding others opportunities for meaningful growth, that we have the resources to respond and are more likely to reach out to others. We’re left feeling courageous, con dent, and connected.
The good news McGonigal points out, is that because stress is a biological state designed to help you learn from experience, your stress response is extremely receptive to the effects of deliberate practice. So if you want to be able to be comfortably uncomfortably and face challenges confidently, stand up for yourself, seek social support instead of withdrawing and find meaning in your suffering, there is no better way to change your habits than to practice this new response during stress. Every moment of stress is an opportunity to transform your stress responses.
Instead of trying to rid ourselves of stress, McGonigal suggests trying these three simple steps:
* Acknowledge stress when you experience it. Simply allow yourself to notice the stress, including how it affects your body.
• Welcome the stress by recognising 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? Which part of the stress response do you need most right now? Do you need to fight, escape, engage, connect, find meaning, or grow? If there is a side of the stress response you would like to develop, consider what it would look like in any stressful situation you are dealing with now.
* Then try 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 values and your goals? What strengths can you draw upon to respond in the way you want?
Her research has also found that it may help to set stress goals that are difficult and meaningful to give you plenty of practice, have open and honest conversations about your struggles so that you feel less alone in your suffering and to go out of your way help others so that you can access the biology of hope and courage.
Just to be clear, the research on stress doesn’t suggest that the most helpful beliefs are a naïve insistence that everything bad will turn into something good. Rather, it’s the ability to notice the opportunities for learning and growth as you try to cope with things that are difficult and challenging. Think of it as an exercise in being able to hold opposite perspectives at once—the and rather than the either/ or—instead of an exercise in positive thinking.
