How to make stress your friend

            The speaker is a health psychologist and his mission is to help people be happier and healthier. Previously, she supposes stress makes sick. But, now she has changed her mind about stress and he wants to change our minds. She starts with the study. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful to our health. People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as 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 the 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 us.

When we change your mind about stress, we can change our body's response to stress. The speaker wants audience all to count backward from 996 in increments of seven. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. If we're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to our brain and participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident.

The speaker said Stress makes us sociable, it’s about a hormone, oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. Oxytocin is a neuro - hormone, some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin to become more compassionate and caring. But, here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone, this stress hormone strengthens our heart and the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So, when we reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, we release more of this hormone, our stress response becomes healthier and we actually recover faster from stress.

Kelly McGonigal finishes the speech by telling about one more study about stress. She believes this study can save our lives. The study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. When we choose to view our stress response as helpful, we create the biology of courage and when we choose to connect with others under stress, we can create resilience. Stress gives us access to our hearts, the compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others and our pounding physical heart working so hard to give you strength and energy and when we choose to view stress in this way.