How to Make Stress Your Friend

ted.com

6 points·ccvannorman··3 comments

TL;DR: Stress is defined in modern society as horrible, detrimental to physical and mental health, and to be avoided at all costs (see "mindfulness", "yoga", etc). However, Kelly uses science to show that simply by changing your mindset towards stress, you can change its long term implications for your health.

This video changed my life, because I live a stressful life, and while I don't endorse stress by itself, coping with it in this way is of huge importance to me.

I think this can be generalized to other emotional responses. The implicit, non-verbal parts of your brain do a hell of a lot of processing in order to output emotions. And they do that for a reason - stress to prepare yourself for action, anger to deal with conflict, joy to share good things with others, etc. A hell of a lot of people tend to try to fight the symptoms of negative emotions, rather than sussing out the cause and dissolving the root.

In some sense, "how do I cope with stress" or "how do I deal with my anxiety" is the wrong question. The right question looks more like "what is my anxiety trying to tell me?"

I read "self-help" book a while back called "Stress for Success". The premise was that we can condition ourselves to psychological stressors in much the same way that a physically fit person can condition themselves to physical demands.

I agree with this. A certain amount of stress is good if you can overcome it and it makes you more resistant to higher stress in the future.

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