Having Fun on the River

Positive Thinking about Stress Can Add Years to Your Life

by Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Thinking about Stress as Helpful Rather than Harmful

We’ve all learned that stress is the villain in our lives. What if positive thinking about stress is actually helpful?

When you change how you think about the role of stress in your life, you can move past the belief that everything called “stress” is bad for you and consider the ways that you need stress in your life.

Consider this quotation from my book about the essential role of stress in any creative process.

Think about the radical notion that stress is a necessary part of any creative process—with one important revision. “Stress” language is usually about what you don’t want in your life. When it comes to describing the actions of your heart and your accordion, the word stress is often replaced by the word compression

Both stress and compression squeeze. However stress gets the bad reputation while compression gets the good reputation. Hearts and accordions don’t work without compression. You already know stress as the villain in your life. Do you also know that stress—under the name of compression—is essential for your life? Using the power of compression—stress—in a dynamic process is an essential part of any creative activity (Page 94, From Stress Relief That Works).

Continue reading for scientific evidence that the way you think about stress could add decades to your life.

We know stress can cause physical harm as well as premature death – but it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, rethinking stress to be a friend rather than a foe can serve a protective function and make stress something that works for us, rather than against us.

The physiological changes that come about from stress are not necessarily bad for us.

The key lies in our thinking. Our perception of stress can shift it from a negative force to a more positive one. Let me explain.

Stress: The Mind-Body Connection

It’s been long established that the mind and body are closely connected. Now, research has found that the way we think about stress could add decades to our lives. Yep. Decades.

Research from Harvard has found that reframing stress as helpful rather than harmful can improve performance and reverse the physiological changes brought about by stress.

In the first of its kind, a massive study of almost 30,000 participants explored the relationship between the experience of stress, the perception of how stress affects health, and mortality. Researchers used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). Here’s what they found:

  • The risk of premature death was increased if people who were experiencing stress believed that stress would adversely impact their health.
  • Those who reported experiencing high stress and who also believed that stress adversely affected health had a 43% increase in the risk of premature death.
  • Those who experienced high stress but didn’t believe it to be harmful were at the lowest risk of dying – even lower than people who didn’t experience a lot of stress.

Though further research is needed to establish a causal relationship, the evidence from this study is compelling. Stress alone isn’t dangerous, but perceiving it to be is. If this were a causal relationship (and there’s no evidence yet that it is), the combination of the experience of stress, together with the perception that stress is bad for health would be around the 14th leading cause of death.

How Does it Work?

The exact mechanisms aren’t clear but there are a few compelling theories.

  1. Previous research has found that people who have a pessimistic expectation of life show poorer mental and physical health. They also display more negative health symptoms even in response to a placebo. Negative expectations may give rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the expectation that stress is harmful negatively influences the self-reporting of health.
  2. People who have experienced moderate amounts of stress before may be more resilient to stress in the future. Therefore, when faced with a lot of stress, they have experience telling them that they get through it relatively unscathed.
  3. Those who believe that stress adversely affects their health may be more likely to believe that stress is attributable to circumstances outside of their control. Research has shown that people who believe that control of things, like health, lies outside of themselves are more likely to experience trouble than those who believe their health is within their control.
  4. In the same way anxiety spirals because of ‘anxiety about the anxiety’, being ‘stressed about the stress’ would likely exacerbate the experience of stress as well as the physiological effects.
  5. Research has found that thinking about stress in a positive light stops blood vessels constricting during stress. It’s this constriction has a hefty contribution to cardiovascular disease. Viewing stress as something positive actually keeps the blood vessels relaxed, similar to what happens when people experience joy and courage. When the effect of this is taken over a lifetime, this alone could be the difference between dying of a heart attack mid-life, and living a long and heart-attack free life.

When you view stress in a positive way, as something that is there to help you, your body believes you and your physiological response to stress becomes much healthier.

Read more about scientific research that demonstrates that stress is helpful at Hey Sigmund. By Hey Sigmund.

[Original Post October 13, 2015]

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