The Positive Stress Mindset: why stress can be good for us

For most of my life and until very recently, I've always looked at stress as something very negative. I've spent most of my life avoiding it, trying to hide from it, trying to go back to safety because stress was a threat to my well-being and to my health. I have to say that I have been exposed to much stress in my life and it has done a lot of damage.

We constantly hear that stress is bad. And it is true a lot of stress is bad for us and has profound effects on our body on our health. But at the same time, new research and new evidence over the past 20 years is showing that stress can also be good for us.

There is a study that I came across that's been discussed a lot over the past 20 years. 25 years ago, 30,000 adults were asked 'are you experiencing a lot of stress in your life right now'? They were also asked 'do you view stress as something negative and harmful?' Eight years later they followed up on these people and they looked at what had happened to their health. What they found was that the people who had said that they were experiencing a lot of stress in their lives had a 43% higher chance of dying. But this only applied to the people who had also said 'I see stress as being harmful'. The people who had experienced stress and who had said 'yes I am experiencing fairly high stress right now', but who also responded 'no, I do not see stress as harmful', did not have a 43% chance higher chance of dying. On the contrary, they had a lower chance of dying than the people who had said 'I'm not experiencing a a lot of stress in my life'.

So what this study showed is that stress, when viewed as something positive, can actually protect your health and can be good for you. We are so used to hearing about stress being so bad for us that we forget that stress, from an evolutionary perspective, has been built into us for a reason. And that reason is to protect us and to help to learn and to perform.

If you are suffering from chronic stress, which is repeated stress, like I did for many years, then this is clearly not good for you and it will be harmful to your health. But acute stress, short bursts of stress which we experience in our lives and at work all the time, can be ok if we do not immediately think that it will harm us ('Oh no, this is terrible, I'm starting to sweat, I'm having this reaction, this is not good, I must avoid it, I must stop what I'm doing').

If you switch your mindset and start thinking and feeling something like this: 'I'm reacting like this, I'm feeling this, I am used to thinking that this is not very pleasant but maybe this is an opportunity for me to grow to learn to be challenged', then stress becomes an entirely new experience. If you can reframe the experience, something different happens in your body. You will still be releasing cortisol and adrenaline and other stress hormones and neurotransmitters, but they will impact your health in a different way. A short (not chronic) burst of stress accompanied by positive thoughts, will trigger your immune system in a positive way. It will also help you to focus and perform better and will help you with motivation. This reframing and careful exposition to stress is an effective way to increase resilience.

I find is very powerful to think that stress can protect us and that it exist to help us. So next time you feel stressed, try to look at it differently, try to reframe the situation and see if you can go through it instead of immediately avoiding it.

I have developed a method to help leaders and employees to build a positive stress mindset to increase performance, well-being, focus and motivation.

More information here:

www.burnouthelp.info

You can also watch my video on this topic:

https://youtu.be/cY-MZb6IfJg?feature=shared

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