In her TED Talk, Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal states that throughout her career she has advised her patients to rid stress from their lives because it can have a negative impact on the human body – she has made stress the ‘enemy’. However, recent work by Lauren Wisk, PhD, and her colleagues has her revising her approach to stress.
Described in a 2011 American Psychological Association article, Dr. Wisk’s team linked survey data on nearly 30,000 US adults to national death records in order to determine the relationship between levels of stress, the perception that stress impacts health and health outcomes. They found that both higher levels of reported stress and the perception that stress affects health were independently associated with worse physical and mental health.
Most strikingly, those who reported a lot of stress and that stress greatly impacted their health together had a 43 percent increased risk of premature death (over an eight year period), suggesting that how you think about stress matters just as much as how much stress you have.
When you change your mind about stress you can change your body’s response to stress. The presenter suggests that when stress is viewed as a positive, something helpful to performance, a person will be able to decrease the negative effects of stress on physical health.
TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to “ideas worth spreading”, sponsors a conference series of inspiring presentations which have attracted a global audience. TED conferences bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).
Click here to access the study abstract in Health Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association.