We tend to think of stress as all bad, but it doesn’t have to be. Without stress, we might feel less motivated, and if we’re pushing our life forward, getting things done and achieving our goals, stress will always be part of that.
Stress is a fixed and natural part of our lives so, instead of trying to fight it or get rid of it, we need to make stress work for us by learning how to manage it better.
I found this TED talk the other day and was blown away by the research and the findings. It’s all about stress and how you perceive it and therefore how it affects you. This is a MUST watch!
Further Reading
What I’ve Learned About Being Happy From One of the Longest Lockdowns in the World
Wish I could believe this. I suppose what you believe is more important than what is true because believing makes it true…sometimes. I have developed a seizure disorder, lost my teeth, have IBS and I attribute it to stress. It’s not a convenient excuse on my part. It’s reality.
What I do think is how you manage stress is key. It’s taken me 40 years to learn to manage it properly, through yoga, meditation, deep breathing & anti-depressants. But it’s working. I don’t think stress is my friend. I think it’s my teacher.
Don’t feel bad. A lot of these TED talks are popularized, oversimplified discussions of research or don’t apply to people with serious problems.
This piece is all about reframing how you think. I think that it has taught you to be good to yourself!
That was quite interesting, thank you for sharing it. I will definitely try to view stress differently now. Not 100% convinced though, because this didn’t discuss any of the other symptoms I felt when hyper-stressed: anger, IBS, not wanting to see folk, inability to think straight etc etc. I don’t want to sound negative, especially in response to you posting something that made me really interested – just widening the discussion to ponder whether it would have been enough for me to have told myself: this is OK, your body is coping; go interact/do some charity work. Seems to belittle it somehow? Thank you – I enjoyed this and the ensuing thought process! Rachel ☺
Great talk! Thanks for sharing — I’m naturally a solution-oriented person, so this speaks to me.
This talk is interesting but really illustrates some issues with social science. People being asked to rate their own stress makes these studies incapable of supporting her conclusions. The people who had enormous stress and could help others were clearly not suffering from, say, a debilitating cancer diagnosis and treatment. It could be that the people who weren’t helping others were actually unable to. This would mean that your outlook had no bearing on survival rates, rather the actual severity of the stress you were under might have dictated whether or not people died. Furthermore, the lab study of coping methods was useful in thinking about learning a relaxation technique to deal with a minor level of stress as induced in the study. It cannot show whether these findings would be reproduced in people who were under acute stress or stress where the physical reactions had no outlet such as when waiting for surgery, e.g. Finally, the first study might simply show that people were right when they felt the stress they were under was harmful to their health. I know we all like to feel in control, but we have to be very careful with telling people who are genuinely sufferign great hardship in life that positive thinking is the solution.
I finally listened to this. Thanks so much for sharing!