Key Insight: Shifting your mindset around stress to “stress can be a learning and growth opportunity” positively impacts almost every aspect of your life. Stress can be good and very helpful. 

5 Takeaways 

1. The new science also shows that changing your mind about stress can make you healthier and happier. How you think about stress affects everything from your cardiovascular health to your ability to find meaning in life. The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it.

2. Embracing stress can make you feel more empowered in the face of challenges. It can enable you to better use the energy of stress without burning out. It can help you turn stressful experiences into a source of social connection rather than isolation. And finally, it can lead you to new ways of finding meaning in suffering

3. Changing your mindset around stress could have the single greatest impact of its impact on you. Science has shown that changing your mindset has a biochemical impact on you. Your stress mindset shapes everything from the emotions you feel during a stressful situation to the way you cope with stressful events. That, in turn, can determine whether you thrive under stress or end up burned out and depressed. The good news is, even if you are firmly convinced that stress is harmful, you can still cultivate a mindset that helps you thrive
4. Having a stronger physical stress response predicts better long-term recovery from a traumatic event. Also positively impacts babies for mothers who cope with a moderate amount of stress during pregnancy 
5. Challenge-response- Embracing stress as a positive activation during performance, test, speech, improves performance compared to people who tried to calm down. Contrary to what many people expect, top performers in these fields aren’t physiologically calm under pressure; rather, they have strong challenge responses. The stress response gives them access to their mental and physical resources, and the result is increased confidence, enhanced concentration, and peak performance.

Find meaning in your life! What are the best predictors of a meaningful life? Surprisingly, stress ranked high. In fact, every measure of stress that the researchers asked about predicted a greater sense of meaning in life. People who had experienced the highest number of stressful life events in the past were most likely to consider their lives meaningful. People who said they were under a lot of stress right now also rated their lives as more meaningful.

Introduction

People who reported high levels of stress but who did not view their stress as harmful were not more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than those who reported experiencing very little stress.

The researchers concluded that it wasn’t stress alone that was killing people. It was the combination of stress and the belief that stress is harmful.

Yale University followed middle-aged adults for twenty years. Those who had a positive view of aging in midlife lived an average of 7.6 years longer than those who had a negative view. To put that number in perspective, consider this: Many things we regard as obvious and important protective factors, such as exercising regularly, not smoking, and maintaining healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, have been shown, on average, to add less than four years to one’s life span.

Those who believe that most people can be trusted tend to live longer (guess I’m fucked). In a fifteen-year study by Duke University (can we trust them?) researchers, 60 percent of adults over the age of fifty-five who viewed others as trustworthy were still alive at the end of the study. In contrast, 60 percent of those with a more cynical view of human nature had died.

 

How people try to create change in others often backfires

• But studies show that the warnings often have the reverse effect. The most threatening images (say, a lung cancer patient dying in a hospital bed) actually increase smokers’ positive attitudes toward smoking. The reason? The images trigger fear, and what better way to calm down than to smoke a cigarette? The doctors assumed that the fear would inspire behavior change, but instead it just motivates a desire to escape feeling bad.
• Overweight women read a New York Times article about how employers are beginning to discriminate against overweight workers. Afterward, instead of vowing to lose weight, the women ate twice as many calories of junk food as overweight women who had read an article on a different workplace issue.

 

The latest science reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger, and more successful. It helps you learn and grow. It can even inspire courage and compassion.

 

The new science also shows that changing your mind about stress can make you healthier and happier. How you think about stress affects everything from your cardiovascular health to your ability to find meaning in life. The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it.

Embracing stress can make you feel more empowered in the face of challenges. It can enable you to better use the energy of stress without burning out. It can help you turn stressful experiences into a source of social connection rather than isolation. And finally, it can lead you to new ways of finding meaning in suffering.

What is Stress?

• Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake. This definition is big enough to hold both the frustration over traffic and the grief over a loss. It includes your thoughts, emotions, and physical reactions when you’re feeling stressed, as well as how you choose to cope with situations you’d describe as stressful. This definition also highlights an important truth about stress: Stress and meaning are inextricably linked. You don’t stress out about things you don’t care about, and you can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress.

PART 1 | Rethink Stress

CHAPTER 1 | how to change your mind about stress 

(Mindsets) How you think about something can transform its effect on you.

• Mindsets are beliefs that shape your reality, including objective physical reactions (like the strength of my arm as Crum pushed on it), and even long-term health, happiness, and success. More importantly, the new field of mindset science shows that a single brief intervention, designed to change how you think about something, can improve your health, happiness, and success, even years into the future.
• Alia Crum’s provocative hypothesis is that when two outcomes are possible—in this case, the health benefits of exercise or the strain of physical labor—a person’s expectations influence which outcome is more likely. She concluded that the housekeepers’ perception of their work as healthy exercise transformed its effects on their bodies. In other words, the effect you expect is the effect you get.
• Participants were given a shake labeled high calorie or skinny shake (both had the same calories). Drinking the Sensi-Shake led to a small decline in ghrelin while consuming the Indulgence shake produced a much bigger drop. But here’s the thing: The milkshake labels were a sham. Both times, participants had been given the same 380-calorie milkshake. There should have been no difference in how the participants’ digestive tracts responded. And yet, when they believed that the shake was an indulgent treat, their ghrelin levels dropped three times as much as when they thought it was a diet drink. Once again, the effect people expected—fullness—was the outcome they got. Crum’s study showed that expectations could alter something as concrete as how much of a hormone the cells of your gastrointestinal tract secrete.
• In both the housekeeping and the milkshake studies, when people’s perceptions changed, their bodies’ responses changed. And in each study, one particular belief seemed to enhance the body’s most adaptive response: Viewing physical labor as exercise helped the body experience the benefits of being active. Viewing a milkshake as a high-calorie indulgence helped the body produce signals of fullness.

How your brain grows from stress

• The saliva I had drooled into the test tube provided a sample of two stress hormones: cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). These hormones are both released by your adrenal glands during times of stress, but they serve different roles. Cortisol helps turn sugar and fat into energy and improves the ability of your body and brain to use that energy. Cortisol also suppresses some biological functions that are less important during stress, such as digestion, reproduction, and growth. DHEA, on the other hand, is a neurosteroid, which is exactly what it sounds like: a hormone that helps your brain grow. In the same way that testosterone helps your body grow stronger from physical exercise, DHEA helps your brain grow stronger from stressful experiences. It also counters some of the effects of cortisol. For example, DHEA speeds up wound repair and enhances immune function. (See if there is a research study of supplementing with DHEA for repair/increased brain growth
• You need both of these hormones, and neither is a “good” nor “bad” stress hormone. However, the ratio of these two hormones can influence the long-term consequences of stress, especially when that stress is chronic. Higher levels of cortisol can be associated with worse outcomes, such as impaired immune function and depression. In contrast, higher levels of DHEA have been linked to a reduced risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, neurodegeneration, and other diseases we typically think of as stress-related.
• The ratio of DHEA to cortisol is called the Growth Index of a stress response. A higher growth index—meaning more DHEA—helps people thrive under stress. It predicts academic persistence and resilience in college students, as well as higher GPAs. During military survival training, a higher growth index is associated with greater focus, less dissociation, and superior problem-solving skills, as well as fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms afterward. The growth index even predicts resilience in extreme circumstances, such as recovering from child abuse.

View stress as helpful to change your reality (biochemistry)

• Participants who had watched the stress-is-enhancing video before the interview released more DHEA and had a higher growth index than participants who had watched the stress-is-debilitating video. Viewing stress as enhancing made it so—not in some subjective, self-reported way, but in the ratio of stress hormones produced by the participants’ adrenal glands. Viewing stress as helpful created a different biological reality.
• How often do you say, “This is so stressful” or “I’m so stressed”? In each of these moments, how you think about stress can alter your biochemistry and, ultimately, how you respond to whatever has triggered the stress. *Note to self- never say that 

Mindset Effects (The Key to everything) 

• A belief in this kind of power goes beyond a placebo effect. This is a mindset effect. Unlike a placebo, which tends to have a short-lived impact on a highly specific outcome, the consequences of a mindset snowball over time, increasing in influence and long-term impact.
• The beliefs that become mindsets transcend preferences, learned facts, or intellectual opinions. They are core beliefs that reflect your philosophy of life. 
• Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, which tracked adults ages eighteen to forty-nine for an impressive thirty-eight years, found that those with the most positive views of aging had an 80 percent lower risk of a heart attack. Beliefs about aging also influence recovery from major illnesses and accidents.
• In another study, a positive view of aging predicted faster and more complete physical recovery from a debilitating illness or accident.
• Findings like this suggest that how you think about aging affects health and longevity not through some mystical power of positive thinking but by influencing your goals and choices. This is a perfect example of a mindset effect. It is more powerful than a placebo effect because it doesn’t just alter your present experience but also influences your future.

How you think about stress

• It turns out that how you think about stress is also one of those core beliefs that can affect your health, happiness, and success. As we’ll see, your stress mindset shapes everything from the emotions you feel during a stressful situation to the way you cope with stressful events. That, in turn, can determine whether you thrive under stress or end up burned out and depressed. The good news is, even if you are firmly convinced that stress is harmful, you can still cultivate a mindset that helps you thrive.

Mindset 1: Stress Is Harmful (Don’t use this mindset) 

• Experiencing stress depletes my health and vitality. Experiencing stress debilitates my performance and productivity. Experiencing stress inhibits my learning and growth. The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided. 
• Harvard School of Public Health, 85 percent of Americans agreed that stress has a negative impact on health, family life, and work. According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, most people perceive their own stress levels as unhealthy.
• Stress mindsets are powerful because they affect not just how you think but also how you act. When you view stress as harmful, it is something to be avoided. Feeling stressed becomes a signal to try to escape or reduce the stress. And indeed, people who endorse a stress-is-harmful mindset are more likely to say that they cope with stress by trying to avoid it.

Mindset 2: Stress Is Enhancing. 

• • Experiencing stress enhances my performance and productivity. Experiencing stress improves my health and vitality. Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth. The effects of stress are positive and should be utilized.
  • I conducted a survey of CEOs, vice presidents, and general managers who were participating in Stanford University’s Executive Leadership Development program, and 51 percent said they did their best work while under stress. In the 2014 Harvard School of Public Health survey, 67 percent of those who reported the highest levels of stress also said they had experienced at least one benefit from their stress.
  • Crum’s research shows that people who believe stress is enhancing are less depressed and more satisfied with their lives than those who believe stress is harmful. They have more energy and fewer health problems. They’re happier and more productive at work. They also have a different relationship to the stress in their lives: They are more likely to view stressful situations as a challenge, not an overwhelming problem. They have greater confidence in their ability to cope with those challenges, and they are better able to find meaning in difficult circumstances. 

• Crum considered the possibility that a positive view of stress might be the result of an easier life. But when she looked at the data, she found only a weak link between how people thought about stress and the severity of the stress they were under. She also found a very small correlation between the number of stressful life events (such as divorce, the death of a loved one, or changing jobs) that people experienced in the past year and how negative their views of stress were. It is not the case that people with a positive attitude toward stress have a life free of suffering. Moreover, Crum also found that a positive view of stress was beneficial to people whether they were currently under a little or a lot of stress, and no matter how stressful or stress-free the past year had been.

• In addition to optimism, two other personality traits seem to be associated with a more positive view of stress: mindfulness and the ability to tolerate uncertainty.

• People who believe that stress can be helpful are more likely to say that they cope with stress proactively. For example, they are more likely to: Accept the fact that the stressful event has occurred and is real. Plan a strategy for dealing with the source of stress. Seek information, help, or advice. Take steps to overcome, remove, or change the source of stress. Try to make the best of the situation by viewing it in a more positive way or by using it as an opportunity to grow.

• When you face difficulties head-on, instead of trying to avoid or deny them, you build your resources for dealing with stressful experiences. You become more confident in your ability to handle life’s challenges. You create a strong network of social support. Problems that can be managed get taken care of, instead of spiraling out of control. Situations that you can’t control become opportunities to grow. In this way, as with many mindsets, the belief that stress is helpful becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mindset Interventions to help with stress 

• The first stress mindset intervention took place at the global financial firm UBS during the height of the 2008 economic collapse. The financial industry is a notoriously stressful place to work. One study found that within ten years of entering the industry, 100 percent of investment bankers developed at least one condition associated with burnout, such as insomnia, alcoholism, or depression. (Is this a real stat?)
• What her work shows is that very brief interventions can lead to lasting changes in how people think about and experience stress. Adopting a more positive view of stress reduces what we usually think of as stress-related problems and helps people thrive under high levels of stress.
• David Yeager (Growth Mindset Improves Achievement for students) wanted to teach freshmen at this school a growth mindset (Book by Carol Dweck must read)—the belief that people can change in significant ways. To do this, he had the students read a short article that introduced a few key ideas: Who you are now is not necessarily who you will be later in life; how people treat you or see you now is not necessarily a sign of who you really are or who you will be in the future; people’s personalities can change meaningfully over time. The students also read first-person accounts from upperclassmen describing experiences that reflected this message of change. Finally, the students were asked to write a story about their own experiences of how people—themselves included—could change over time. At the end of the school year, students who had received the intervention were more optimistic and less overwhelmed by the problems in their lives. They had fewer health problems and were less likely to become depressed than students who had been randomly assigned to a control group. 81 percent of the students who received the intervention passed their ninth-grade algebra class, compared with only 58 percent of students in the control group. The effect of the intervention on academic achievement was strongest for those whose mindset had changed the most. On average, these students began freshman year with a 1.6 GPA (equivalent to a C–) and ended with a 2.6 GPA (B–). The magnitude of this intervention’s impact is remarkable.. How are programs like this not being run in every youth organization?
• That’s the thing about mindset interventions: They seem too good to be true. They contradict a deeply held cultural belief about the process of change itself. We believe that all meaningful problems are deeply rooted and difficult to change. Many problems are deeply rooted, and yet one of the themes you’ll see again and again in this book is that small shifts in mindset can trigger a cascade of changes so profound that they test the limits of what seems possible. We are used to believing that we need to change everything about our lives first, and then we will be happy, or healthy, or whatever it is we think we want to experience. The science of mindsets says we have it backward. Changing our minds can be a catalyst for all the other changes we want to make in our lives. But first, we may need to convince ourselves that such change is possible.
• Surprisingly, pills clearly labeled “Placebo” have provided relief from migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, and depression, often with benefits comparable to the best real treatments. Asking patients to be in on the trick—by explaining how the placebo effect works—does not reduce the placebo’s effectiveness. It may even enhance the effect.

THE MOST effective mindset interventions have three parts: 

1) learning the new point of view

2) doing an exercise that encourages you to adopt and apply the new mindset

3) providing an opportunity to share the idea with others

• The first step is to acknowledge stress when you experience it. Simply allow yourself to notice the stress, including how it affects your body. The second step is to welcome the stress by recognizing 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? The third step is 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 goals and values?
• The first step toward changing your mind about stress is to notice how your current mindset shows up in everyday life.
• We usually don’t see the effect of a mindset because we are too identified with the beliefs behind it. The mindset doesn’t feel like a choice that we make; it feels like an accurate assessment of how the world works. Even if you are fully aware of what you think about stress, you probably don’t realize how that belief affects your thoughts, emotions, and actions. I call this “mindset blindness.” The solution is to practice mindset mindfulness—by paying attention to how your current stress mindset operates in your life.
• To get to know your stress mindset, start to notice how you think and talk about stress. Because a mindset is like a filter that colors every experience, you’ll probably discover that you have a standard way of thinking and talking about stress. What do you say out loud or think to yourself?
• Your stress mindset will also influence how you react to other people’s stress. Notice how you feel and what you say or do when people around you are stressed. When other people complain about stress, does it make you anxious? Do you tell them to calm down or not to stress so much?

Once you start looking for stress mindsets, you’ll see them everywhere: in the media, in how other people talk about their lives, even in advertisements that use the promise of stress reduction to sell everything from shampoo to office furniture.

• The most helpful mindset toward stress is one that is flexible, not black or white: to be able to see both sides of stress but choose to see the upside; to feel your own distress and yet also decide to focus on how that stress connects to what you care about. Her hunch is that making a deliberate shift in mindset when you’re feeling stressed is even more empowering than having an automatically positive view.

 

Stress helps overcome difficulties

• Akron, Ohio, hospital. Patients who had just survived a major car or motorcycle accident were asked to pee into a cup. These urine samples were part of a study on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The researchers wanted to know: Can you predict who develops PTSD based on their level of stress hormones immediately after the trauma? One month after their accidents, nine of the fifty-five patients were diagnosed with PTSD. They had flashbacks and nightmares. They tried to avoid reminders of the accident by not driving, staying off highways, or refusing to talk about what happened. Yet forty-six patients were not suffering in the same way. These more resilient patients had a different post-accident pee profile than the patients who developed PTSD. They had higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. Stress ended up preventing PTSD

 

• Most people view the stress response as a toxic state to be minimized, but the reality is not so bleak. In many ways, the stress response is your best ally during difficult moments—a resource to rely on rather than an enemy to vanquish.
• The study of accident survivors at the Akron trauma center was just the first of several showing that a stronger physical stress response predicts better long-term recovery from a traumatic event. In fact, one of the most promising new therapies to prevent or treat PTSD is administering doses of stress hormones.
• American Journal of Psychiatry describes how stress hormones reversed post-traumatic stress disorder in a fifty-year-old man who had survived a terrorist attack five years earlier. After taking ten milligrams of cortisol a day for three months, his PTSD symptoms decreased to the point that he no longer became extremely distressed when he thought about the attack. Physicians have also begun to administer stress hormones to patients about to undergo traumatic surgery. Among high-risk cardiac surgery patients, this approach has been shown to reduce the time in intensive care, minimize traumatic stress symptoms, and improve quality of life six months after surgery. Stress hormones have even become a supplement to traditional psychotherapy. Taking a dose of stress hormones right before a therapy session can improve the effectiveness of treatment for anxiety and phobias.

Stress and pregnancy

• A 2011 review of over a hundred studies found that only severe stress, such as surviving a terrorist attack or being homeless during pregnancy, increased the risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. Higher levels of daily stress and hassles did not. Some degree of stress during pregnancy may even benefit the baby. For example, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that women who reported greater stress during pregnancy had babies born with superior brain development and higher heart rate variability, a biological measure of resilience to stress. Exposure to a mom’s stress hormones in the womb teaches a baby’s developing nervous system how to handle stress. 

CHAPTER 2 | Beyond fight-or-flight 

• Unlike what most people believe, there is no one uniform physical stress response that is triggered by all stressful situations. The specific cardiovascular changes, the ratio of hormones released, and other aspects of a stress response can vary widely. Differences in your physical stress response can create very different psychological and social responses, an increase in altruism among them.
• There are several prototypical stress responses, each with a different biological profile that motivates various strategies for dealing with stress. For example, a 
  • Challenge-Response increases self-confidence, motivates action, and helps you learn from experience; while a 
  • Tend-and-befriend response increases courage, motivates caregiving, and strengthens your social relationships. Alongside the familiar fight-or-flight response, these make up your stress response repertoire.

Stress Gives You Energy to Help You Rise to the Challenge As Walter Cannon observed, a fight-or-flight stress response starts when your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. To make you more alert and ready to act, the sympathetic nervous system directs your whole body to mobilize energy. Your liver dumps fat and sugar into your bloodstream for fuel. Your breathing deepens so that more oxygen is delivered to your heart. And your heart rate speeds up to deliver oxygen, fat, and sugar to your muscles and brain. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol help your muscles and brain take in and use that energy more efficiently. In all these ways, your stress response gets you ready to face whatever challenges lie in front of you.

• This part of the stress response can give you extraordinary physical abilities. There are countless news reports of so-called hysterical strength attributed to stress, including the story of two teenage girls in Lebanon, Oregon, who raised a three-thousand-pound tractor off their father, who was trapped underneath. “I don’t know how I lifted it, it was just so heavy,” one of the girls told reporters. “But we just did it.” Many people have this kind of experience during stress: They don’t know how they find the strength or courage to act. But when it matters most, their bodies give them the energy and will to do what’s necessary.
• The energy you get from stress doesn’t just help your body act; it also fires up your brain. Adrenaline wakes up your senses. Your pupils dilate to let in more light, and your hearing sharpens. The brain processes what you perceive more quickly. Mind-wandering stops and less important priorities drop away. Stress can create a state of concentrated attention, one that gives you access to more information about your physical environment.
• You also get a motivation boost from a chemical cocktail of endorphins, adrenaline, testosterone, and dopamine. This side of the stress response is one reason some people enjoy a stress—it provides a bit of a rush. Together, these chemicals increase your sense of confidence and power. They make you more willing to pursue your goals and to approach whatever is triggering the flood of feel-good chemicals. Some scientists call this the “excite and delight” side of stress. It’s been observed both in skydivers falling out of planes and people falling in love. If you get a thrill out of watching a close game or rushing to meet a deadline, you know this side of stress.
• When your survival is on the line, these biological changes come on strong, and you may find yourself having a classic fight-or-flight response. But when the stressful situation is less threatening, the brain and body shift into a different state: the CHALLENGE RESPONSE. Like a fight-or-flight response, a challenge-response gives you energy and helps you perform under pressure. Your heart rate still rises, your adrenaline spikes, your muscles, and brain get more fuel, and the feel-good chemicals surge. But it differs from a fight-or-flight response in a few important ways: You feel focused but not fearful. You also release a different ratio of stress hormones, including higher levels of DHEA, which helps you recover and learn from stress. This raises the growth index of your stress response, the beneficial ratio of stress hormones that can determine, in part, whether a stressful experience is strengthening or harmful.

Flow States and Challenge-Response 

• People who report being in a flow state—a highly enjoyable state of being completely absorbed in what you are doing—display clear signs of a challenge-response. Artists, athletes, surgeons, video gamers, and musicians all show this kind of stress response when they’re engaged in their craft or skill. Contrary to what many people expect, top performers in these fields aren’t physiologically calm under pressure; rather, they have strong challenge responses. The stress response gives them access to their mental and physical resources, and the result is increased confidence, enhanced concentration, and peak performance.

 

Stress Makes You Social to Encourage Connection/ Oxytocin 

• Your stress response doesn’t just give you energy. In many circumstances, it also motivates you to connect with others. This side of stress is primarily driven by the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin has gotten a lot of hype as the “love molecule” and the “cuddle hormone” because it’s released from your pituitary gland when you hug someone.
• But oxytocin is a much more complex neurohormone that fine-tunes your brain’s social instincts. Its primary function is to build and strengthen social bonds, which is why it’s released during those hugs, as well as sex and breastfeeding.
• Elevated levels of oxytocin make you want to connect with others. It creates a craving for social contact, be it through touch, a text message, or a shared beer.
• Oxytocin also makes your brain better able to notice and understand what other people are thinking and feeling. It enhances your empathy and your intuition. When your oxytocin levels are high, you’re more likely to trust and help the people you care about.
• But oxytocin is about more than social connection. It’s also a chemical of courage. Oxytocin dampens the fear response in your brain, suppressing the instinct to freeze or flee. This hormone doesn’t just make you want a hug; it also makes you brave.
• When oxytocin is released as part of the stress response, it’s encouraging you to connect with your support network. It also strengthens your most important relationships by making you more responsive to others. Scientists refer to this as the tend-and-befriend response. Unlike the fight-or-flight response, which is primarily about self-survival, the tend-and-befriend response motivates you to protect the people and communities you care about. And, importantly, it gives you the courage to do so.
• Oxytocin has one more surprise benefit: This so-called love hormone is actually good for cardiovascular health. Your heart has special receptors for oxytocin, which helps heart cells regenerate and repair from any micro-damage. When your stress response includes oxytocin, stress can literally strengthen your heart.This is quite different from the message we usually hear—that stress will give you a heart attack! There is such a thing as a stress-induced heart attack, typically triggered by a massive adrenaline surge, but not every stress response damages your heart. Stressing out rats before trying to chemically induce a heart attack actually protected them from heart damage. But when researchers gave the rats a drug that blocked oxytocin release, stress no longer protected their hearts. This study hints at one of the most surprising sides of stress: Your stress response has a built-in mechanism for resilience—one that motivates you to care for others while also strengthening your physical heart.

Stress Helps You Learn and Grow 

• The last stage of any stress response is recovery when your body and brain return to a non-stressed state. The body relies on a pharmacy of stress hormones to help you recover. For example, cortisol and oxytocin reduce inflammation and restore balance to the autonomic nervous system. DHEA and nerve growth factors increase neuroplasticity so that your brain can learn from stressful experiences.
• Though you may have thought of stress hormones as something you need to recover from, in this case, it’s the reverse. These stress hormones are built into the stress response because they help you recover physically and mentally. People who release higher levels of these hormones during a stressful experience tend to bounce back faster, with less lingering distress.
• The stress recovery process isn’t instantaneous. For several hours after you have a strong stress response, the brain is rewiring itself to remember and learn from the experience. During this time, stress hormones increase activity in brain regions that support learning and memory. As your brain tries to process your experience, you may find yourself unable to stop thinking about what happened. You might feel an impulse to talk with someone about it, or to pray about
• Emotions often run high during the recovery process. You may find yourself too energized or agitated to calm down. It’s not uncommon to feel fear, shock, anger, guilt, or sadness as you recover from a stressful experience. You may also feel relief, joy, or gratitude. These emotions often coexist during the recovery period and are part of how the brain makes sense of the experience. They encourage you to reflect on what happened and to extract lessons to help you deal with future stress. They also make the experience more memorable.
• The neurochemistry of these emotions render the brain more Plastic—a term used to describe how capable the brain is of remodeling itself based on experience. In this way, the emotions that follow stress help you learn from experience and create meaning.
• This is all part of how past stress teaches the brain and body how to handle future stress. Stress leaves an imprint on your brain that prepares you to deal with similar stress the next time you encounter it. Not every minor irritation will trigger this process, but when you go through a seriously challenging experience, your body and brain learn from it. Psychologists call this stress inoculation. It’s like a stress vaccine for your brain. That’s why putting people through practice stress is a key training technique for NASA astronauts, emergency responders, elite athletes, and others who have to thrive in highly stressful environments. Stress inoculation has been used to prepare children for emergency evacuations, train employees to deal with hostile work environments, and even help coach those with autism for stressful social interactions. It can also explain the findings of scientists like Stanford’s Karen Parker, who has shown how early life stress can lead to later resilience.
• Once you appreciate that going through stress makes you better at it, you may find it easier to face each new challenge. In fact, research shows that expecting to learn from a stressful experience can shift your physical stress response to support stress inoculation.

Life History impacts the influence of stress

• Your life history can also influence how you respond to stress. In particular, your early experiences with stress can have a strong effect on how your stress system functions as an adult. For example, adults who experienced a life-threatening illness in their youth tend to show a strong oxytocin response to stress. They learned early on to rely on others in times of stress, priming them to have a tend-and-befriend response. In contrast, adults who experienced abuse during childhood show a smaller oxytocin response to stress. They are more likely to have learned not to trust others in stressful times. As adults, they are primed to cope through the self-defense of a fight-or-flight response or the self-reliance of a challenge-response.
• Even your genes shape how you respond to stress. Some genes predispose people to enjoy the adrenaline rush of a stress response and seek out stressful stimulation. These same genes increase the tendency to have a competitive, fight-or-flight response. Other genes affect how sensitive you are to oxytocin, and therefore influence the tendency to have a tend-and-befriend response to stress. Your genetic profile even influences how strongly stress affects you. Some people are born more resilient to stress, which makes them less reactive to stressful circumstances and less easily changed—for better or worse—by stressful experiences. Other people are naturally more sensitive to stress. Paradoxically, this increases the likelihood of both negative outcomes from stress, such as depression or anxiety, and positive outcomes, such as heightened compassion and personal growth. However, as we’ll see, none of these genetic differences are destiny. They set up predispositions that interact with your life experiences and conscious choices. The stress response system is adaptive, constantly trying to figure out how to best handle whatever challenges you face.
• Trauma creates a temporary expectation that the world is an unsafe place, and the brain and body prepare by priming a fight-or-flight response. It’s important to recognize that these changes are strategic, not signs of a broken stress system. Although these adaptations have costs, they also have very practical benefits. More important, these adaptations are not permanent. Your brain and body continue to reshape themselves to help you face the most important challenges in your life. Even changes induced by traumatic events can be reversed through new life experiences and relationships
• Finally, you have a say in how your body responds to stress. Stress is a biological state designed to help you learn from experience. That means your stress response is extremely receptive to the effects of deliberate practice. Every moment of stress is an opportunity to transform your stress instincts.

When you feel stressed

• When you feel your body responding to stress, ask yourself which part of the stress response you need most. Do you need to fight, escape, engage, connect, find meaning, or grow?
• We get stressed when our goals are on the line, so we take action. We get stressed when our values are threatened, so we defend them. We get stressed when we need courage. We get stressed so we can connect with others. We get stressed so that we will learn from our mistakes.
• The stress response is more than a basic survival instinct. It is built into how humans operate, how we relate to one another, and how we navigate our place in the world. When you understand this, the stress response is no longer something to be feared. It is something to be appreciated, harnessed, and even trusted.

Does less stress = more happiness?

• To the researchers’ surprise, the higher a nation’s stress index, the higher the nation’s well-being. The higher the percentage of people who said they had felt a great deal of stress the day before, the higher that nation’s life expectancy and GDP. A higher stress index also predicted higher national scores on measures of happiness and satisfaction with life.
• When it came to overall well-being, the happiest people in the poll weren’t the ones without stress. Instead, they were the people who were highly stressed but not depressed. These individuals were the most likely to view their lives as close to ideal. In contrast, the researchers reported that among individuals who appeared to be the most unhappy, experiencing high levels of shame and anger and low levels of joy, “there was a notable lack of stress.”

 

A meaningful life = a stressful life

• I call this the Stress Paradox. High levels of stress are associated with both distress and well-being. Importantly, happy lives are not stress-free, nor does a stress-free life guarantee happiness. Even though most people view stress as harmful, higher levels of stress seem to go along with things we want: love, health, and satisfaction with our lives.
• The best way to understand the stress paradox is to look at the relationship between stress and meaning. It turns out that a meaningful life is also a stressful life. Is Your Life Meaningful?
• What are the best predictors of a meaningful life? Surprisingly, stress ranked high. In fact, every measure of stress that the researchers asked about predicted a greater sense of meaning in life. People who had experienced the highest number of stressful life events in the past were most likely to consider their lives meaningful. People who said they were under a lot of stress right now also rated their lives as more meaningful.
• “People with very meaningful lives worry more and have more stress than people with less meaningful lives.”
• One reason is that stress seems to be an inevitable consequence of engaging in roles and pursuing goals that feed our sense of purpose.
• Gallup World Poll found that raising a child under eighteen significantly increases the chance that you will experience a great deal of stress every day—and that you will smile and laugh a lot each day. True statement 
• Entrepreneurs who say that they experienced a great deal of stress yesterday are also more likely to say that they learned something interesting that day.
• Rather than being a sign that something is wrong with your life, feeling stressed can be a barometer for how engaged you are in activities and relationships that are personally meaningful.

 

Stress and mortality 

• People are happier when they are busier, even when forced to take on more than they would choose. A dramatic decrease in busyness may explain why retirement can increase the risk of developing depression by 40 percent. A lack of meaningful stress may even be bad for your health. Note to self, never retire. 
• In one large epidemiological study, middle-aged men who reported higher levels of boredom were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack over the next twenty years. In contrast, many studies show that people who have a sense of purpose live longer. For example, in a study that followed over nine thousand adults in the U.K. for ten years, those who reported highly meaningful lives had a 30 percent reduction in mortality. This reduced risk held even after controlling for factors including education, wealth, depression, and health behaviors such as smoking, exercise, and drinking.
• When the most commonly reported sources of stress in people’s lives overlap with the greatest sources of meaning, it’s clear that stress may even contribute to well-being. 
• Human beings have an innate instinct and capacity to make sense out of their suffering. This instinct is even part of the biological stress response, often experienced as rumination, spiritual inquiry, and soul-searching. Stressful circumstances awaken this process in us. This is one more reason why a stressful life is often a meaningful life; stress challenges us to find the meaning in our lives. The greatest learnings in life have come after the most stressful times. 
• In 2014, a major report was released that looked at the effects of stress on mortality among these men. Of the two types of stress, daily hassles were by far the better predictor of mortality. Men who reported the most daily hassles between 1989 and 2005 were three times more likely to have died by 2010 than those who reported the fewest hassles.Feeling burdened rather than uplifted by everyday duties is more a mindset than a measure of what is going on in your life.
• It was this mindset—not some objective measure of stressful events—that best predicted the risk of death among the men in the Normative Aging Study over five decades. Summing up the study as “stress kills” (which plenty of media reports did) doesn’t make sense. The study’s takeaway shouldn’t be to try to reduce the so-called hassles in your life. The takeaway should be to change your relationship to the everyday experiences you perceive as hassles. The same experiences that give rise to daily stress can also be sources of uplift or meaning—but we must choose to view them that way.

Know your values and write them down 

• Turns out that writing about your values is one of the most effective psychological interventions ever studied. In the short term, writing about personal values makes people feel more powerful, in control, proud, and strong. It also makes them feel more loving, connected, and empathetic toward others. It increases pain tolerance, enhances self-control, and reduces unhelpful rumination after a stressful experience.
• After the three-week break was over, the researchers collected the students’ journals and asked them about their breaks. The students who had written about their values were in better health and better spirits. Over break, they had experienced fewer illnesses and health problems. Heading back to school, they were more confident about their abilities to handle stress. The positive effect of writing about values was greatest for those students who had experienced the most stress over break.
• What had made the writing assignment so helpful. Their conclusion: Writing about values helped the students see the meaning in their lives. Stressful experiences were no longer simply hassles to endure; they became an expression of the students’ values. Giving a younger sibling a ride reflected how much a student cared about his family. Working on an application for an internship was a way to take a step toward future goals. To the students asked to see their deepest values in daily activities, small things that might otherwise have seemed irritating became moments of meaning.
• In the long term, writing about values has been shown to boost GPAs, reduce doctor visits, improve mental health, and help with everything from weight loss to quitting smoking and reducing problem drinking. It helps people persevere in the face of discrimination and reduces self-handicapping. In many cases, these benefits are a result of a onetime mindset intervention. People who write about their values once, for ten minutes, show benefits months or even years later.
• When people are connected to their values, they are more likely to believe that they can improve their situation through effort and the support of others. That makes them more likely to take positive action and less likely to use avoidant coping strategies like procrastination or denial.
• When you reflect on your values, the story you tell yourself about stress shifts. You see yourself as strong and able to grow from adversity. You become more likely to approach challenges than to avoid them.

Sometimes when you are in the middle of a stressful situation, you need to shift your mindset. Research shows that reflecting on your values in moments of stress can help you cope. In a study at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, for example, participants were given bracelets that said, “Remember the values.” The study participants were encouraged to look at the bracelet or keychain when they were feeling stressed and to think about their most important values at that moment. This added instruction helped people deal with adversity even better than a one-time writing exercise. When you can’t control or get rid of stress, you can still choose how you respond it. Remembering your values can help transform stress from something that is happening against your will and outside your control to something that invites you to honor and deepen your priorities.

Understanding/Communicating/ Dealing with emotions/stress

• Mindfulness isn’t about relaxation or escaping the stress of the day. Instead, it is the ability to pay attention to and accept whatever thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening. If you’re feeling sad, you notice what sadness feels like in your body. 
• How you talk about stress with the people you care about matters. One way we know what we are capable of is through the eyes of others. When you take this view for them and with them, you help them see their own strength, and you remind them of the purpose of their struggles.
• Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness.
• The University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle Stress Generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you.

PART 2 | Transform Stress

“hardiness” -the courage to grow from stress.

kwihangana, a trust in the future and in other people.

 

• Resilience is also seen as a social process, not just an individual trait. The community must have ubufasha abaturage batanga—people come together in difficult times to support one another.

Grow from stress 

• Maddi’s definition of what it means to be good at stress—the courage to grow from stress—is still my favorite description of resilience. It reminds us that we cannot always control the stress in our lives, but we can choose our relationship to it. It acknowledges that embracing stress is an act of bravery, one that requires choosing meaning over avoiding discomfort.
• Brooks designed an experiment to find out. She told some people who were about to give a speech to relax and calm their nerves by saying to themselves, “I am calm.” Others were told to embrace the anxiety and say to themselves, “I am excited.” Neither strategy made the anxiety go away. Both groups still had nerves before their speech. However, the participants who had told themselves “I am excited” felt better able to handle the pressure. Despite feeling anxious, they were confident in their ability to give a good talk. People who watched the speeches rated the excited speakers as more persuasive, confident, and competent than the participants who had tried to calm down. With one change in mindset, they had transformed their anxiety into energy that helped them perform under pressure.
• Even in situations where it seems obvious that calming down would help, being amped up can improve performance under pressure. For example, middle school, high school, and college students who have greater increases in adrenaline during exams outperform their more chilled-out peers. Green Berets, Rangers, and Marines who have the highest increases in the stress hormone cortisol while undergoing hostile interrogation are less likely to provide the enemy with useful information (Link to study). And in a training exercise, federal law enforcement officers who showed the greatest increases in heart rate during a hostage negotiation were the least likely to accidentally shoot the hostage.
• When it comes to performing under pressure, being stressed is better than being relaxed. (Find research of MMA/BJJ martial artists who sleep just minutes before a fight and remain calm. Also surfers?)
• Jamieson first tested his theory with college students preparing to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), an entrance exam for admission to PhD programs. He invited the students into a classroom to take a practice test. Before the test, he collected saliva samples from the students to get baseline measures of their stress response. He told all the students that the goal of the study was to examine how the physiological stress response affects performance. Then Jamieson gave half the students a brief pep talk to help them rethink their pre-exam nerves: People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly. However, recent research suggests that stress doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your stress could be helping you do well. 
• The group that received the mindset message showed higher, not lower, levels of salivary alpha-amylase, a measure of sympathetic activation from stress. The message had not calmed the students down physically. In fact, they were more, not less, stressed. But most interesting was the relationship between stress and performance. A stronger physical stress response was associated with higher exam scores—but only for students who received the mindset intervention.The message had helped students take advantage of their stress and use it to fuel higher performance. In contrast, there was no relationship between stress hormones and performance in the control group. The stress response didn’t help or hurt in any predictable way. The mindset intervention changed the meaning of students’ physical state in a way that changed its actual effect on performance. Choosing to see their stress as helpful made it so. This is what makes mindset interventions so exciting. When they work, they don’t just have a onetime placebo effect. They stick.

How anxiety helps you rise to the challenge 

• After the test, students completed a measure of how depleted they felt by the experience. Those who had been encouraged to view their stress and anxiety as energy were the least exhausted.
• The doctors and teachers who experienced the most anxiety were protected against burnout if they viewed anxiety as helpful. The researchers concluded that if people could learn to accept stress and anxiety as part of a challenging work life, that anxiety could actually become a resource rather than a drain on their energy.

Helping people handle anxiety 

• If you want to help people better cope with anxiety, a more useful strategy might be to simply tell them that you think they can handle it. Studies show that when people are told, “You’re the kind of person whose performance improves under pressure,” their actual performance improves by 33 percent.
• Telling people who are nervous that they need to calm down can convince them that they don’t have what it takes. Trusting them to handle the pressure can help them rise to the challenge.
• In a situation that requires us to perform under pressure—like an athletic competition, a public speech, or an exam—the ideal stress response is one that gives us energy, helps us focus, and encourages us to act: the challenge response. It gives us the motivation to approach the challenge head-on, and the mental and physical resources to succeed.
• Sometimes, however, performance stress triggers a fight-or-flight response, the emergency instinct that has given stress a bad reputation. When a person has a fight-or-flight response under the pressure to perform, psychologists call this a Threat Response. A threat response isn’t an overreaction of the stress response system—it’s an entirely different kind of stress response, one that primes you more for self-defense than for success. During a threat response, the body is anticipating physical harm. To minimize the blood loss that might follow a nasty fight, your blood vessels constrict. The body also ramps up inflammation and mobilizes immune cells to prepare you to heal quickly.
• In contrast, during a Challenge Response, your body responds more like how it does during physical exercise. Because you aren’t anticipating harm, the body feels safe maximizing blood flow to give you the most possible energy. Unlike in a threat response, your blood vessels stay relaxed. Your heart also has a stronger beat—not just faster, but with greater force. Each time your heart contracts, it pumps out more blood. So, a challenge response gives you even more energy than a threat response.
• These cardiovascular changes have implications for the long-term health consequences of stress. The kind of stress response associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease is a threat response, not a challenge response.
• In fact, the tendency to have a challenge response, rather than a threat response, is associated with superior aging, cardiovascular health, and brain health. Middle-aged and older men who have a challenge response to stress are less likely to be diagnosed with metabolic syndrome than those with a threat response.Those with a challenge response physiology had a greater brain volume across their life spans. In other words, their brains shrunk less as they aged.

Performing under pressure

• Your stress response also affects how well you perform under pressure. During a threat response, your emotions will likely include fear, anger, self-doubt, or shame. Because your primary goal is to protect yourself, you become more vigilant to signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle in which your heightened attention to what’s going wrong makes you even more fearful and self-doubting.
• During a challenge response, you may feel a little anxious, but you also feel excited, energized, enthusiastic, and confident. Your primary goal is not to avoid harm, but rather to go after what you want. Your attention is more open and ready to engage with your environment, and you’re prepared to put your resources to work.
• Scientists have studied these different stress responses in many high-stakes situations, and a challenge response consistently predicts better performance under pressure.
• 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 fine motor skills. When faced with engine failure during a flight simulation, pilots make better use of plane data and have safer landings.
• Importantly, none of these studies showed that performance was enhanced by the absence of a stress response; it was enhanced by the presence of a challenge response.

Stress reducing strategies get in the way of elite performance

• • If we think all stress responses sabotage success, we may rely on stress-reducing strategies that get in the way of peak performance.
  • The threat response is more likely to sensitize the brain to future threats. It will make you better able to detect threats and more reactive to similar stressful situations. The rewiring that takes place in the brain after a threat response tends to strengthen the connections between the areas of the brain that detect threats and trigger survival coping.
  • In contrast, when you have a challenge response, the brain is more likely to learn resilience from a stressful experience. In part, this is because you release more resilience-boosting hormones, including DHEA and nerve growth factor. The rewiring that takes place in your brain following a challenge response strengthens the connections between the parts of the brain’s prefrontal cortex that suppress fear and enhance positive motivation during stress.

• When you want to perform well, and aren’t in danger, a challenge response is by far the most helpful stress response. It gives you more energy, improves performance, helps you learn from the experience, and is even healthier for you.

• Psychologists found that the most important factor in determining your response to pressure is how you think about your ability to handle it. If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response.

Let’s take a breath and appreciate the full scope of what the mindset intervention did. It boosted participants’ perception of their resources to cope with stress. It shifted their cardiovascular stress responses from threat to challenge, without calming them down. They showed greater confidence and engagement, and less anxiety, shame, and avoidance. Objectively, they performed better. Afterward, they were less distracted by thoughts of fear and failure. And the catalyst for this transformation? One simple shift in how they thought about the stress response. The new mindset turned the body’s stress response from a perceived barrier into a perceived resource, tipping the balance from “I can’t handle this” to “I’ve got this.”

• Imagine how this mindset shift could add up over time. The difference between a chronic threat response and a chronic challenge response isn’t just whether you can give a good speech or focus during an exam. It could mean the difference between feeling overwhelmed or feeling empowered by the stress in your life. It could even mean the difference between having a heart attack at fifty or living into your nineties.

Anxiety and stress response 

• Among people with an anxiety disorder who were encouraged to embrace their anxiety, a stronger physical stress response was associated with more confidence and better performance under pressure and social scrutiny.
• This is what shocks people the most. Even when anxiety really is a problem, embracing it helps. The value of rethinking stress is not limited to people who aren’t really struggling. In fact, embracing the stress response may be even more important for those who suffer from anxiety.
• Everyone experiences an increase in heart rate and adrenaline. People with anxiety disorders perceive those changes differently. They may be more aware of the sensations of their heart beating or the changes in their breathing. And they make more negative assumptions about those sensations, fearing a panic attack. But their physical response is not fundamentally different.

Embracing stress is a radical act of self-trust: View yourself as capable and your body as a resource. You don’t have to wait until you no longer have fear, stress, or anxiety to do what matters most. Stress doesn’t have to be a sign to stop and give up on yourself. This kind of mindset shift is a catalyst, not a cure. It doesn’t erase your suffering or make your problems disappear. But if you are willing to rethink your stress response, it may help you recognize your strength and access your courage.

CHAPTER 5 | connect | how caring creates resilience 

• The social caregiving system is regulated by oxytocin. When this system is activated, you feel more empathy, connection, and trust, as well as a stronger desire to bond or be close with others. This network also inhibits the fear centers of the brain, increasing your courage. The reward system releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. Activation of the reward system increases motivation while dampening fear. When your stress response includes a rush of dopamine, you feel optimistic about your ability to do something meaningful. Dopamine also primes the brain for physical action, making sure you don’t freeze under pressure. The attunement system is driven by the neurotransmitter serotonin. When this system is activated, it enhances your perception, intuition, and self-control. This makes it easier to understand what is needed, and helps ensure that your actions have the biggest positive impact. In other words, a tend-and-befriend response makes you social, brave, and smart. It provides both the courage and hope we need to propel us into action and the awareness to act skillfully.
• Here’s where things get interesting. A tend-and-befriend response may have evolved to help us protect offspring, but when you are in that state, your bravery translates to any challenge you face. And—this is the most important part—anytime you choose to help others, you activate this state. Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.
• A study by neuroscientists at UCLA demonstrated exactly how caring for others flips the brain’s switch from fear to hope. The two coping strategies participants used in this study—holding hands and squeezing a stress ball—are good examples of how we react to our loved ones’ suffering in real life. Sometimes we turn our attention to our loved ones, to see if we can comfort, support, or help—that’s a tend-and-befriend response. It’s an act of courage, even if all we do is listen and stay with them. Other times, we look for ways to escape the distress we feel about their suffering. This pulls our attention away from our loved ones and makes us less able or willing to help. We may retreat physically or mentally, turning to avoidance coping strategies to ease our own discomfort. Psychologists call this Compassion Collapse—by trying to avoid the stress we feel about their stress, we become paralyzed instead of mobilized. The researchers in this study found that the two coping strategies had very different effects on the participants’ brain activity. When the participants reached out to hold their loved ones’ hands, activity increased in the reward and caregiving systems of the brain. Reaching out also decreased activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain known to trigger fear and avoidance. In contrast, squeezing the stress ball had no effect on the amygdala’s activity. Like most avoidance strategies, squeezing the ball didn’t reduce distress, and it actually decreased activity in the reward and caregiving systems—suggesting that it reinforced participants’ feeling of powerlessness. This study tells us two things. First, where we place our attention when people we care about are suffering can change our own stress response. If we focus on comforting, helping, and caring for our loved ones, we experience hope and connection. If instead, we focus on relieving our own distress, we stay stuck in fear. The second thing this study shows is that we can create the biology of courage through small actions. In this case, it was holding a loved one’s hand while he or she experienced pain. In everyday life, there are many opportunities to make similar small choices of connection.

Whether you are overwhelmed by your own stress or the suffering of others, the way to find hope is to connect, not to escape. The benefits of taking a tend-and-befriend approach go beyond helping your loved ones, although this, of course, is an important function. In any situation where you feel powerless, doing something to support others can help you sustain your motivation and optimism.

• THIS SIDE effect of a tend-and-befriend response makes helping others a surprisingly effective way to transform stress. For example, researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania were interested in finding a way to relieve time pressure at work. You know the feeling: There’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. Time scarcity is not just a stressful feeling; it’s a state of mind that has been shown to lead to poor decisions and unhealthy choices. Surprisingly, helping someone else decreased people’s feeling of time scarcity more than actually giving them extra time did. Those who had helped someone else reported afterward that they felt more capable, competent, and useful than people who had spent the time on themselves. This, in turn, changed how they felt about what they had to accomplish and their ability to handle the pressure. In this way, the experiment resembles Jeremy Jamieson’s embrace-mindset interventions—helping others boosted their self-confidence, which changed how they felt about the demands they faced. Their newfound confidence also changed how they perceived something as objective as time; after helping someone else, time, as a resource, expanded.
• People often underestimate how good they will feel when they help others. For example, people wrongly predict that spending money on themselves will make them happier than spending money on others when the reverse is true. Giving can boost your mood even when you are forced to do it.
• Make the choice to be generous first, and the uplift comes later. Especially when you are feeling like your own resources—whether time, energy, or otherwise—are scarce, choosing to be generous is a way to access the resilience that goes along with a tend-and-befriend response. If you struggle with avoidance, self-doubt, or feeling overwhelmed, helping others is one of the most powerful motivation boosters that you can find.

Bigger than self goals 

• • When your primary goal is to contribute to this “something bigger,” you still work just as hard, but the motivation driving you is different. Rather than just trying to prove that you are good enough or better than others, you view your efforts as serving a purpose greater than yourself. Instead of focusing on only your own success, you also want to support others to further the broader mission.

• When people are connected to bigger-than-self goals, they feel better: more hopeful, curious, caring, grateful, inspired, and excited. In contrast, when people are operating from self-focused goals, they are more likely to feel confused, anxious, angry, envious, and lonely.

• One reason for this difference is that people who operate from a bigger-than-self mindset end up building strong social support networks. Paradoxically, by focusing on helping others instead of proving themselves, they become more respected and better liked than people who spend more energy trying to impress others than they do supporting them. In contrast, people who relentlessly pursue self-focused goals are more likely to be resented and rejected by others, and to experience a decline in social support over time.=
• Crocker has shown that everyone has both types of goals—to prove themselves and to contribute to something bigger than themselves—and that these motivations fluctuate over time. (One primary factor seems to be the people around us; Crocker has found that both self-focused and bigger-than-self goals are contagious.)
• When people are invited to reflect on their bigger-than-self goals, they can switch mindsets. Moreover, when they do, it transforms their experience of stress.
• In one study, college students were given a twenty-minute “beyond-the-self” mindset intervention that included this exercise: Take a moment to think about what kind of person you want to be in the future. Also think about what kind of positive impact you want to have on the people around you or society in general. . . . In the space below, write a few sentences that answer this question: How will learning in school help you be the kind of person you want to be, or help you make the kind of impact you want on the people around you or society in general? Yeager and his colleagues found that when students thought about their bigger-than-self goals, it changed the meaning of both boring work and academic struggles. The new meaning—that persevering at their studies would help them make a difference in the world—motivated them to engage with, rather than avoid, the stress of challenging themselves.

Designing Bigger-Than-Self Goals into the Workplace

• Monica Worline is a founding member of the CompassionLab Research Group, One exercise she uses to help businesses increase employee resilience is called role redesign—rewriting your job description from a bigger-than-self perspective. Most job descriptions list the tasks involved, the skills required, and the priorities of the position. But they rarely give you a sense of the why—the contribution the person in the job makes to the organization or the community. In role redesign, Worline asks people to consider: What if you described your job from the point of view of the people you work with or serve? What would they say about how your role helps them? How does your job support the greater mission of the company or the welfare of people in your community? Although this reframing doesn’t change the basic tasks of the job, it does shift how people perceive them. Worline has found that this exercise reliably increases the meaning and satisfaction people take from their work.

Compassion 

• Many people mistakenly assume that compassion is a weakness and that caring about others will deplete our resources. But what the science and these examples show is that caring can actually amplify our resources. Because social species—including human beings—can not survive on their own, nature has equipped us with an entire motivational system that ensures we care for one another. In many ways, this system is even more crucial to our survival than the fight-or-flight instinct. Perhaps that is why nature bestowed it with the power to give us not just energy but also hope, courage, and even intuition. When we engage that motivational system through tending and befriending, we also tap into the resources we need to handle our own challenges and make wise decisions. Far from being a drain, tending and befriending can empower us.
• When life is most stressful, this benefit of tending and befriending is even more crucial to our survival. The instinct to help when we, ourselves, are struggling plays an important role in preventing a defeat response. The defeat response is a biologically hardwired response to repeated victimization that leads to loss of appetite, social isolation, depression, and even suicide. Its main effect is to make you withdraw. You lose motivation, hope, and the desire to connect with others. It becomes impossible to see meaning in your life or to imagine any action you could take that would improve the situation.
• As awful as it sounds, a defeat response is nature’s way of removing you from the picture so you don’t use up communal resources.
• Research abounds with examples of how helping others reduces feelings of hopelessness after a personal crisis. Here are a few examples: People who volunteer after a natural disaster report feeling more optimistic and energized, and less anxious, angry, and overwhelmed, by the stress in their lives. After the death of a spouse, taking care of others reduces depression. Survivors of a natural disaster are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder if they help others in the immediate aftermath. Among people living with chronic pain, becoming a peer counselor relieves pain, disability, and depression and increases sense of purpose. Victims of a terrorist attack feel less survivor guilt and find more meaning in life when they find a way to help others. After enduring a life-threatening health crisis, people who volunteer experience more hope, less depression, and a greater sense of purpose.
• Among people who did not serve their communities in some way, every stressful life event, like a divorce or job loss, increased the risk of developing a new health problem. But there was no such risk for people who regularly spent time giving back. For them, there was zero association between stressful life events and health.

The same scientists conducted another study, this time looking at the effects of helping on longevity. The researchers tracked 846 men and women living in the Detroit area for five years. Once again, caring created resilience. Among those who did not routinely help others, every significant stressful life event increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But participants who went out of their way to help others showed absolutely no stress-related increased risk of death. In fact, even when they had experienced several traumatic events, they had the same risk of dying like people who experienced no major stressful life events. They seemed to be completely protected from the harmful effects of stress.

• People who understand that suffering is part of everyone’s life are happier, more resilient, and more satisfied with life. They are more open about their struggles and more likely to receive support from others. They are also more likely to find meaning in adversity and less likely to experience burnout at work. And yet, despite the benefits of recognizing common humanity, people often underestimate the stress in other people’s lives and overestimate other people’s happiness.

We judge our insides by others outsides

• We often judge our insides, which we know intimately, by other people’s outsides, because that is all we can see. Often we are surprised and taken aback to find a coworker is struggling with suicidal thoughts, a neighbor who has a drinking problem, or the lovely couple down the road engaging in domestic violence. When you ride with people on the elevator or exchange pleasantries in the line at the grocery store, they may appear calm and in control. Outward appearances do not always reflect the struggles within.
• I’ve found that to feel less alone in your stress, two things help: The first is to increase your awareness of other people’s suffering. The second is to be more open about yours.
• The social nature of stress is not something to fear. When you take a tend-and-befriend approach, even contagious stress can be strengthened. As we’ve seen, caring creates resilience, whether altruism is a response to rescue us from our own suffering or simply a natural reaction to the pain of others. A sympathetic stress response to another person’s suffering can spark empathy and motivate helping, which in turn enhances our own well-being. Furthermore, we shouldn’t be afraid to let others see the truth of our own struggles—especially when we need their support. In many ways, our transparency is a gift, allowing others to feel less alone and offering them the opportunity to experience the benefits of tending and befriending.

 

CHAPTER 6 Grow | how adversity makes you stronger

• TAKE A MOMENT to identify a time in your life that was a period of significant personal growth—a turning point that led to positive changes or a newly found purpose. When you have a specific period of your life in mind, then consider this: Would you also describe this time as stressful? This is the paradox of stress on full display: Even if we would prefer to have less stress in our lives, it’s the difficult times that give rise to growth.
• Research also shows that choosing to see this side of stress can help you learn and grow. To find the courage to grow from stress, you need to believe that something good can come from your suffering. You also need to be able to see and celebrate the positive changes in yourself as you grow from the experience.
• The good that comes from difficult experiences isn’t from the stressful or traumatic event itself; it comes from you—from the strengths that are awakened by adversity and from the natural human capacity to transform suffering into meaning. Part of embracing stress is to trust this capacity, even when the pain is fresh and the future uncertain.
• Once again, he found evidence that adversity can make you resilient. Participants unfamiliar with adversity found the cold to be the most painful and unpleasant and took their hands out the fastest. People who had faced the most adversity kept their hands in the longest.Seery also asked participants what they had been thinking during the pain. Those who had experienced the least adversity were more likely to think things like I kept wishing that it would be over. I thought that the pain might overwhelm me. I felt that I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it hurt. This kind of thinking—what psychologists call catastrophizing—not only makes a difficult experience more distressing, but it also makes you more likely to give up. In this study, catastrophic thinking explained the relationship between a person’s past adversity and his or her ability to tolerate pain. Going through something difficult makes you less likely to catastrophize, and that gives you greater strength.

Among adults with chronic back pain, those with a history of moderate adversity report less physical impairment, rely less on prescription pain medication, have fewer doctor visits, and are less likely to be unemployed due to disability. They are handling the physical pain better and are less likely to have their lives disrupted by it. Police officers who have experienced at least one traumatic event before joining the police service show greater resilience following a traumatic event on the job, such as witnessing a fatal car accident or the death of a fellow officer. They report fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress and are more likely to report positive outcomes from the trauma, such as an increased appreciation for life. When life has tested your strength, you are more likely to know that you can handle the next challenge, and your past experience can become a resource for coping.

• People have experienced the most traumatic events and also the most ongoing distress. Those with the highest levels of past adversity are more likely to be depressed or have health problems than those who have experienced less suffering.

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

• Growth mindset—to view setbacks as inevitable, and understand that hitting an obstacle means it is time to draw on your resources. A growth mindset can also create resilience more broadly, especially among those who have faced early adversity. 
• Edith Chen, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has identified a coping style called shift-and-persist that seems to protect people from the typical health risks associated with having grown up in poor or unsafe environments. Shifting is a combination of accepting stress and changing the way you think about its source. It’s often measured by asking people how much they agree with statements like “I think about the things I can learn from a situation, or about something good that can come from it.” Persisting is about maintaining the optimism needed to pursue meaning, even in the face of adversity. It is measured with statements like “I think that things will get better in the future” and “I feel my life has a sense of purpose.”
• The experience creates tremendous suffering, but at the same time, inspires positive change. Psychologists call this phenomenon post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth has been reported by survivors of almost every imaginable kind of physical and psychological trauma, including violence, abuse, accidents, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, life-threatening illness, and even long-term space flights. It has been documented among those who live with ongoing stress, such as caring for a child with a developmental disorder, adapting to a spinal cord injury, working as a trauma responder, and living with a chronic illness. When people describe how they have grown from a traumatic event, they report the same kind of changes that Nelson and her husband experienced. Here are some of the most commonly reported forms of growth: I have a greater sense of closeness with, and compassion for, others. I discovered that I’m stronger than I thought I was. I have a greater appreciation for the value of my own life. I have a stronger religious faith. I established a new path for my life.
• The prevalence of post-traumatic growth is hard to estimate. However, it is far from unusual: 74 percent of Israeli youths exposed to terrorist attacks report post-traumatic growth; 83 percent of women with HIV/ AIDS report growth related to their diagnosis and illness; 99 percent of emergency ambulance workers report growth as a result of the trauma they are exposed to during work. As one 2013 review of research on post-traumatic growth declared, “Growth is not a rare phenomenon reported only by exceptional people.”
• The science of post-traumatic growth doesn’t say that there is anything inherently good about suffering. Nor does it say that every traumatic event leads to growth. When any good comes from suffering, the source of that growth resides in you—your strengths, your values, and how you choose to respond to adversity. It does not belong to the trauma.

Choosing to See the Upside of Adversity

• Why does seeing a benefit in these circumstances help? The biggest reason is that seeing the upside of adversity changes the way people cope. It’s a classic mindset effect. People who find benefit in their difficulties report more purpose in life, hope for the future, and confidence in their ability to cope with the current stress in their lives. They then are more likely to take proactive steps to deal with the stress and to make better use of social support. They also are less likely to rely on avoidance strategies to escape their stress. Even their biological response to stress is different. In the laboratory, people who can find a benefit in their struggles show a healthier physical response to stress and a faster recovery. All this—rather than some sort of magical thinking—is why benefit-finding predicts outcomes as far-ranging as less depression, higher marital satisfaction, fewer heart attacks, and stronger immune function.
• It’s the ability to notice the good as you cope with things that are difficult. In fact, being able to see both the good and the bad is associated with better long-term outcomes than focusing purely on the upside. For example, people who report both negative and positive changes after a terrorist attack are more likely to sustain post-traumatic growth than those who initially report only positive changes, such as not taking life for granted anymore.

How the media negatively impacts you 

• Of people who reported high levels of stress, 40 percent mentioned watching, reading, or listening to the news as a major contributor to the stress in their lives. Stress caused by the news, as opposed to stress caused by your life, is unique in its ability to trigger a sense of hopelessness. Watching TV news after a natural disaster or terrorist attack has consistently been shown to increase the risk of developing depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. One shocking study found that people who watched six or more hours of news about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress symptoms than people who were actually at the bombing and were personally affected by it. It’s not just traditional news programs that instill fear and hopelessness; stories of tragedy, trauma and threats dominate many forms of media. In fact, a 2014 study of U.S. adults found that the single best predictor of people’s fear and anxiety was how much time they spent watching TV talk shows.

CHAPTER 7 | final reflections 

• FOR MOST OF its history, the science of stress focused on one question: Is stress bad for you? (Eventually, it graduated to the question, Just how bad is stress for you?) But the interesting thing about the science of stress is that despite the overwhelmingly accepted idea that stress is harmful, the research tells a slightly different story: Stress is harmful, except when it’s not. Consider the examples we’ve seen in this book: 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. For every harmful outcome you can think of, there’s an exception that erases the expected association between stress and something bad—and often replaces it with an unexpected benefit.
• The things that protect us from the dreaded dangers of stress are all attainable. Think about the mindset exercises and strategies described in this book: Choosing to remember your most important values so that it is easier to find the meaning in everyday stress. Having open and honest conversations about your struggles so that you feel less alone in your suffering. Viewing your body’s stress response as a resource so that you can trust yourself to handle the pressure and rise to the challenge. Going out of your way to help someone else so that you can access the biology of hope and courage. Not only are these strategies accessible, but they also don’t require you to achieve the one thing that most people think they need to do, but that turns out to be an impossible and self-destructive goal: to avoid stress.
• Science also tells us that stress is most likely to be harmful when three things are true: You feel inadequate to it; It isolates you from others, and It feels utterly meaningless and against your will.
• When you view stress as inevitably harmful and something to avoid, you become more likely to feel all of these things: doubt about your ability to handle the challenges you face, alone in your suffering, and unable to find meaning in your struggles. In contrast, accepting and embracing stress can transform these states into a totally different experience. Self-doubt is replaced by confidence, fear becomes courage, isolation turns into connection, and suffering gives rise to meaning. And all without getting rid of the stress.

 

Now, because this book is a mindset intervention, you’ve probably already recognized that this story is also an invitation to set your own stress goal. Any new beginning or transition is an opportunity to think about how you want to challenge yourself. Birthdays, the start of a new calendar or school year, Sunday evenings, or each morning as you think about the day ahead. Even right now, you could ask yourself, “How do I want to grow from stress?” If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that any moment can become a turning point in how you experience stress, if you choose to make it one.