De-Stress With These Key Scientific Insights | Kelly McGonigal

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

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0:48Almost 10 years ago, I came across this study that made me really rethink stress. And it was a study that tracked about 30 ,000 adults for almost a decade in the US. And at the beginning of the study, they asked people, first, how stressful is your life? And then also, do you believe that your stress is harmful? Do you believe that stress is bad for your health? And so they followed them to find out, is it true that stress kills? And what they found is that for the subset of people who had a very stressful life and most strongly believed that their stress was harmful, they had a 43 % increased risk of dying from any cause over the next decade.

1:30But the people who had the most stressful lives and did not strongly believe that stress was bad for them, they were the most likely to be alive at the end of the decade. And this study caught my attention because, first of all, it suggests that stress is not always the enemy. At least it's not always a risk factor in the way that we think about it. But then also it was making me think, like, how many of those deaths was I personally responsible for by going out there trying to convince people that stress was bad for their health and that, you know, the stress will kill your brain cells and eventually kill you.

2:04So that was kind of like a wake up moment for me to start to want to investigate. Is it possible that how you think about stress can interact with stress to help you avoid some of the consequences we don't want? And maybe even something good about stress worth embracing so that your mindset could help you harness some of your personal strengths, help you harness to strengthen your community, to get some positive outcomes we maybe don't usually associate with stress. Stress is not something that we often get to choose. So it's not like even if you had a wish list and you could say, I want this much stress and this type of stress, it's not like we have that opportunity.

2:41So what I'm really interested in is this idea that we now call it the stress mindset effect, that there are ways of thinking about stress that can make your body's response to stress healthier, that can change what happens in your brain in moments of stress that make you braver, more resilient, more willing to accept help from others, and that these mindsets basically change the trajectory of how stress affects you. That's the big idea that I hope to share with people. When do we know that we are experiencing good stress versus bad stress? Yeah, no such thing as good stress or bad stress, I want to say.

3:16That is, again, another, I think, a big misconception around stress. Because, you know, people will say things like, oh good stress it's like the stress of getting a promotion or the stress of winning the lottery or the stress of doing something really exciting that you're good at you know like that's good stress and bad stress is all the stuff we don't want it's the pain it's the suffering it's the loss it's the uncertainty what we actually mean when we say we're stressed it's all of that forget good stress bad stress because it sets us up to think that if we're experiencing what all of us will instinctively say, didn't want this, like the bad stress.

3:50That's the real stress for most of us. And again, most of us don't get to choose how stressful our lives are, how stressful the world is. I mean, the time we're living in now is a perfect example of that. And if you label things good stress, bad stress, it can lead to things like believing, let's say you're trying to homeschool your kids right now, and it's enormously stressful, and you're feeling like a bad parent and a bad teacher, and you can't figure out how you're going to get through today, let alone tomorrow. If you believe that's bad stress, you're going to believe I'm not cut out to be a parent.

4:20There's something wrong with my kids. There's something wrong with my life. Here's the distinction that I like to make. Life can be difficult, so that good or bad, but stress is what arises in you when something that you care about is at stake. So it's your thoughts, it's your emotions, it's your biology, it's the stress hormones, it's the adrenaline, it's your desire to reach out to others. It's sometimes a sense of outrage and anger. It's all the stuff that emerges to help you meet a moment that matters. And so what I like to focus on is in moments of stress, some of those instincts are going to be healthy and helpful and others are not.

4:55So rather than like stress being good or bad, it's about learning more about your stress responses, the repertoire that's available to you, and how do you get good at stress so that you can tell in a moment of stress, is this a moment that requires slowing down and going within? Or is this a moment that requires being vulnerable and asking for help? Is this a moment that requires ignoring everything else and rising to the challenge because it's an emergency and I need that adrenaline to live to do it? There's a lot of different ways to be good at stress. And that's the good that I like to focus on.

5:32Sometimes there's a tendency to want to be so positive that we ignore reality. One of the reasons that I'm drawn to the research that I do and the topics that I talk about is because it is not in my nature to be positive. You're a negative person. Oh, pessimistic, anxious, overwhelmed, existential dread, terrified by life from birth. The world is against you, yeah. So I'm drawn a lot to these ideas of choosing positive emotions, reframing things, because it's the antidote to my habits that can become destructive. You could introduce me to somebody who needs to seriously come to terms with the reality of suffering and I'd push them in the opposite direction.

6:13And, you know, oh no, I'm never stressed. Oh, everything happens for a reason. I would want to ground them in the opposite that is also true. We know that the physiology of anxiety and excitement are really similar in your body and in your brain. And if you were to take someone who's feeling really anxious, measure their heart rate, look at the ratio of stress hormones that are coursing through their bloodstream, and you look at someone who's really excited, they're almost identical. One of my favorite studies was actually they had people jumping out of airplanes, and some people were terrified, and some people were like, this is what I live for.

6:48Physiology looked exactly the same, right? The only difference is the story that they were telling themselves about this experience, you know, whether they felt capable of it. And so there's research suggesting that in moments of anxiety, even if truly you're anxious, you're not excited in that moment. All right. Well, my heart is pounding. This means my heart is in it. My heart is giving me energy to meet this moment. And you try saying to yourself, like, I'm here for this. Or whatever your version of, if saying I'm excited feels like too far, I like to say my heart is in it, which is a step from anxiety towards excitement.

7:23Yeah, it's not about lying to yourself or faking it until you make it. It's about saying, okay, my body is getting ready for this. I can feel my body in this moment. So let's roll. You're starting to move towards a stress state that really is just helping you have energy and courage and enjoy the moment. And it also increases positive emotions like confidence and enthusiasm. It makes you better able to connect with other people too. I mean, there are studies that do a similar kind of mindset reset for people who are about to enter a stressful conversation. And like, you know, one of my favorite studies have found that people made more eye contact and they were more likely to mimic the other person's body language in this really natural way that helps build rapport just by reframing their anxiety as energy that they could harness as a sign that they care.

8:17Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

9:07Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

9:22Thank you.