We all experience stress throughout our lives. No one is
immune to it but some people seem to get more than their fair share.
For years we have been hearing that stress makes us sick. It
appears to increase the risk of everything from the common cold to
cardiovascular disease. But what about if we rethink our relationship towards
stress, so that it may not be the enemy we have deemed it to be?
Perception vs. Reality
A study published in Health Psychology that
tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years started by asking
people. “How much stress have you experienced in the past year?” They also
asked, “do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?” Then they
looked at public death records to find out who had died.
If we explore the bad news first, people who experienced a
lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying. However,
this was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for
your health. People who experienced a lot of stress, but did not view stress as
harmful, were no more likely to die than anyone else.
In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the
study, including people who had relatively little stress.
Researchers now estimated that over the eight years of
tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from
the belief that stress is bad for you.
This study has raised the question. Can changing how you
think about stress make you healthier? It appears the science says that it can.
When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body’s response to
stress.
Rethinking the stress response
To explain how this works, a study was designed to stress
participants out, aptly called “The social stress test”. Participants went into
a laboratory and were told to give a 5-minute impromptu speech on their
personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting directing in front
of them. To make sure they felt the pressure, bright lights and a camera were
also in their face. The evaluators were trained to give discouraging,
non-verbal feedback. Part two of the test, involved counting backwards in increments,
where the evaluator was trained to harass the participant whilst doing it. The
impact was likely to induce faster breathing, a pounding heart and maybe
breaking into a sweat. Normally, we interpret these physical cues as anxiety,
or signs that we are not coping very well with the pressure.
However, what if someone viewed them as signs that their
body was energised and just preparing to meet this challenge? Now that is
exactly what participants were told in this study conducted at Harvard
University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught
to rethink their stress response as helpful. Their pounding heart is preparing
them for action. If you are breathing faster, it is no problem. It is getting
more oxygen into your brain.