How to use stress in your favour?
Welcome to Active Human’s 4th newsletter.
By now, you know, we are improving the 6 pillars of our well-being and learning and working on them one by one.
6 important pillars are:
Exercise - More movements spread across the day
Nutrition - Focus on balanced nutrition
Sleep - Improve consistent and deeper sleep
De-Toxification - Hacks to keep the body detoxified
Lifestyle diseases - Prevent and reverse lifestyle diseases
Brain chemistry - Build a positive and abundance Mindset
Today’s newsletter is about seeing stress differently. It’s a hack and you can think of it as a mental model.
Researchers tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years and tried to understand the bad effects of stress.
So they asked the participants, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress harms your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died.
No wonder, People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that Stress is harmful to their health.
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not believe stress was harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.
Now this is the mindset, we all need to learn from.
It is known, that stress causes the adrenal glands to release hormones like oxytocin, cortisol, and adrenalin. Now cortisol is your fight or flight hormone, so it brings focus. If you build a mindset, you can actually use your cortisol to help you perform much better if you don’t perceive stress as a negative thing. But if you keep on thinking you have stress and it’s bad for you, it will actually prove to be bad for you.
In another Harvard study, before the social stress test, participants were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. They were told, that their pounding heart was preparing them for action.
“If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain”, they were told.
Participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, were less stressed out, less anxious, and more confident. The most fascinating finding was how their physical stress response changed and they performed better.
When you don’t see short-term stress as a bad thing, by design, you stop building long-term stress and That is Today’s Newsletter.
See you next Saturday,
Manish Bhagwani,
Human → Active Human
Please watch this video:
Kelly McGonigal translates academic research into practical learnings on how to perceive stress. Watching this video will give you the correct mindset to see and use your stress.
Research papers for further reading:
Stress Study at the University of Wisconsin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3374921/
Stress brings Immunity cells to the forefront: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3412918/
Acute stress improves glutamatergic transmission in the prefrontal cortex: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0906791106