Before watching the TED Talk video “Making Stress Your Friend”, I read the title thinking that having the ability to change our relationship with stress in a way that helps us is a little too good to be true. I agree with the statement that stress is not all that bad. For me personally, I have found that stress is a way to motivate me and remind me of an approaching deadline. If I didn’t have any stress or if I just pushed my stress aside and went along with my life in denial or suppression of the approaching exams, my exam scores would be very, very poor if we’re going to be honest.

Kelly McGonigal, the speaker, describes that stress does not  have to lead to harmful effects. Instead, how we view stress and how we act towards it, can lead to a positive or negative experience. If we choose to think about our bodily responses to stresses as natural processes, a way for our body to energize and prepare us in meeting our challenges, then Kelly claims that we should have more confidence and better performance. As we hear our heart pounding, we are told to think of this as we are breathing faster to get more oxygen to our brains. I could believe the part about participants of this study feeling less anxious and stressed, but the part about the blood vessels being less constricting as a result, was hard for me to believe. This could be true, but she did not mention the statistics of this as random assignment to conditions and how many people had this relaxed vessel.

The statistics that she had made me a little skeptical. For example, “ researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you” I would like to see the study they did, and if there were others to back this one up. Another claim she made was another study, I presume, “tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93″ and “for every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent” but for those “who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying.” To me, it sounds more like people who took care of others had no increase in dying because they were spending time with others and helping them, not asking people around for help and support. I think she would have to clarify and explain that more.

Also, I understand that Kelly is a health psychologist, but how did she just recently find out about these findings, and how much evidence did it take for her to fully believe all of these stats and interpret in ways that make it seem like the solution to not dying early from stress, is to think of stress as helpful? It all seems a little counter intuitive to me. If you don’t think of stress and anxiety to be negative, would you even consider being stressed anymore? To me, stress indicates a feeling of high pressure and resulting panic, not something that gives me courage. I believe that preparing myself mentally for a performance of some sort such as swimming, singing, or playing violin, and having enough practice to back me up is the only way to help calm my nerves. Tests are a whole other monster for me, because I am very much affected by my old test scores and performance, and have my goals and aspirations in the back of my mind. So, telling myself during a test that my sweaty palms and aching back is actually there to help me is very hard to do, especially if it gives me pain.

Another point mentioned in the video, was the idea that we seek others in times of stress and need. This was interesting, as I do this all the time. I feel as if this is very much dependent on personality type however, so it varies person to person. There are some people who just do not want to get help or choose to deal with their stress on their own in their own way and it works for them. I wish it worked that way for me. Kelly goes on to saying that stress makes us more compassionate and seeking to connect with others. But, what if the people you are trying to seek help from do not want to give it, or what if they are too busy and stressed out themselves? That’s a problem I often run into.

However, it still feels pretty good as the speaker ends by saying that if we do think of stress as a not-so-negative thing, “You’re saying that you can trust yourself to handle life’s challenges. And you’re remembering that you don’t have to face them alone.” Maybe I can try to apply this in my own life and tell myself the next time my heart races a million times a second that my body is doing this to help me in this endeavor and that it will help me instead of harm me when taking this test. We will see!

This TED talk was about stress, and instead of stress being  harmful to your body, health psychologist, Kelly McGonigal, expresses how we should turn that harm to something positive happening to your body. I found this video very interesting, and I learned things that I never knew before. I enjoyed how she talks about the side effects of the stress response (such as heart pounding, starting to sweat), and instead of viewing the stress as harmful, all these side effects can be helpful and “prepare you for action.” One of the main messages discussed was on the neuro-hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin functions is various ways such as making you “crave physical contact with your friends and families. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about.” I did not know that Oxytocin does this, and more importantly I did not know that it is a stress hormone. How is it possible for a hormone to do two completely opposite things simultaneously? McGonigal succeeds on turning the tables around for stress, and explains how this hormone being secreted can actually benefit you. The trick is whenever you are stressed and you reach out to someone else you are releasing more of this hormone, and your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this fascinating, because who knew stress can actually be a good thing, and the key factor into recovering is as simple as reaching out to a friend when I need help. After watching this video, I now see stress in a different perspective. I should not let stress wear me down, but instead I should let it help me accomplish what I need to do if I just look at it in a positive way.

After watching Kelly McGonigal’s Ted Talk over stress I honestly feel a bit stressed out. I may be focusing on the wrong part of her discoveries or maybe I’m going about it the wrong way, but her beliefs over stress killing is unbelievable! She spoke about how people who believed stress was a negative part of their lives were 43 percent more likely to die in the next 8 years. That was it, that was the only information she gave. She cannot do that there are so many more implications to death than just stress. For instance everyone on that list could have been around their 90’s living rich fulfilling lives, but with some stress due to physical limitations. Then eight years later 43 percent of them could have passed, but she attributes it to stress? That really doesn’t make sense to me. At first part of me thought it was a slip of the tongue she couldn’t possibly directly correlate stress with death there were way to many variables for that, but then not even five minutes later into this talk she goes to say that stress should be the 15th largest killer of people in the United States. My immediate reaction to that was “How?” Do people just die when too much stress enters their lives? What causes that, how can people determine how much stress will kill them? Unless 43% of her numbers all suddenly were stricken by broken heart syndrome and died from it, I find it incredibly hard to believe that stress was what did them in.

Stress may have something to do with death although without knowing anything about the data she used I cannot tie anything together there. Just the thought that she says that stress legitimately kills you if you think it is bad for you bothers me to no end. It is not a conclusion she can make, death isn’t black and white like that. Besides her belief that stress kills I will say that she made a good point that life is full of stress, but we take it and grow stronger from it. So that is what I am going to continue to do, I will keep going no matter the stress, because eventually I’ll make it to the other side.

Sources: http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en#

Kelly McGonigal has been a health psychologist for 10 years which means she is most likely credible and knows what she’s talking about. Her ideas about tricking your body into believing stress is a good thing sounds easier said than done. When people say they’re stressed, it always a negative thing, it means they are going through a hard time, have to much on their mind or plate, etc. People always express sorrow when they hear someone is stressed, it’s a societal idea that stress is bad. It seems strange that just a simple adjustment of how we perceive our stress can change our health. I’m not sure how easy is it to take a moment when you’re stressed to tell your body that it’s a good thing when you know you don’t really believe that.

The other piece of information about oxytocin makes a little more sense to me. Everyone craves sympathy or supports when they feel stressed and it’s nice to hear that it’s a natural thing to want and can help your body cope with stress. It makes sense that telling someone about your stress can help while bottling it up hurts the person more. I always thought that was just psychological but it’s neat that it also effects people physically.

These two ideas seem easy enough to switch to in life. Next time you feel stressed, you can either tell someone about it or can treat it like a good, healthy challenge to have. I don’t think looking for stress just to do this would be wise but since most people experience relatively high stress often, it should be easy to find and implement in daily life. Whether tricking your body into believing stress is good works or not, maybe constantly telling yourself that will eventually trick you. Once your body react positively to stress, go tell someone your problems and you’re right as rain in the stress department, according to MGonigal.