Can you make use of stress? Excerpted from "The Upside of Stress," May 21, 2015

KELLY MCGONIGAL, Health Psychologist; Lecturer, Stanford University; Author, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It

When we say, “I’m stressed out; this is stressful,” it’s not synonymous with things like depression,
or shame or anger. Stress is actually much more complex. This is what I call the “stress paradox.” When we’re stressed out, we often don’t like it. We don’t like how it feels. It actually motivates us to find something that we can do to change the way we feel. So, there’s something inherently distressing about stress.

In my experience and my training as a health psychologist, I was taught to talk only about that one side of stress: that stress can make you sick, that stress can make you unhappy, that stress can destroy your relationships. I was never really taught to think about stress as a signal of something good or something meaningful in our lives. I certainly was not taught how to use stress so that we can experience more of the connection with others – the sense of meaning and the sense of growth – rather than wasting a lot of energy and time trying to get rid of the stress or fixing those feelings instead of engaging with life.

How people think about stress seems to have a very big effect on the way that stress influences their health, happiness and their productivity at work. People who view stress as harmful, and particularly people who think they should try to avoid stress for that reason, are more likely to experience stress-related health problems; they are more likely to be depressed; they’re more likely to be overwhelmed by the stress in their life; and they’re more likely to be distracted, or unproductive or burnt-out, in the workplace. On the other hand, people who held a more positive view of stress – not necessarily seeing stress as always good but being able to see the good in stress and think about ways to embrace and use it, rather than avoid it or suppress it – they were healthier; they were better able to find meaning in the stressful circumstances of their lives. They also felt more productive and more engaged at work.

Three things describe the people, or the communities, who are good at stress, who don’t experience that collapse in the face of stress. The first is that they find ways to engage with meaningful choices or actions even if they can’t control the source of their stress. They look for things that they can do or choices they can make that continue to move them in a direction of hope and action, rather than looking for ways to disengage from their lives, from their relationships or from the challenges. The second is that they use that stress, or that adversity, as a catalyst for strengthening relationships and building communities of support, instead of isolating themselves or entering a sort of inner narrative that says, "I'm the only one dealing with this.” The third thing is that they have a growth mindset toward adversity and stress, that they believe it’s possible, no matter how difficult this is right now, no matter how overwhelmed they are, or no matter how much they would never have chosen this circumstance, that at a future point in time, this experience would have strengthened them in some meaningful way. They’re able to look back at past adversity and see ways they have been strengthened, and actually appreciate some of those benefits and appreciate their own strengths.

The upside of stress is the fact that human beings have biological, psychological and social capacities for transforming those stressful circumstances into positive action, into connection and compassion, and into learning, growth and meaning, and that they’re actually built into the very thing that we most fear, which is our physiological experience of stress. Finding the upside of stress isn’t so much about trying to find a way to convince yourself that you’re glad your boss is a jerk or that you lost your job, or whatever the situation is. It’s not about trying to spin the positive lining on that. It’s really more about finding a way to trust yourself in stressful circumstances and turn what we thought of as an enemy – our own pounding hearts and our own racing minds and thoughts – to turn that into a resource because that’s really what it is, and we wouldn’t have a stress response if it wasn’t there to help us engage with the challenges in our lives.