I published “The Yoga of Divorce” in 2016 to describe how I used yoga to manage the stress that was hijacking my life during my divorce and to forge a win-win amicable parting. I was responding to my fear of stress, based on the widely-accepted view that it could damage my physical and mental well-being. Although the stress reduction practices I outlined there are valid, that viewpoint turns out to be only half of the truth.
Recent research presents compelling evidence that stress can in fact be good for us if we change our attitude to it. In her famous TED talk How To Make Stress Your Friend and in her bestselling book The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal, a researcher from Stanford University, argues that how we think of stress can determine whether we have a full-throttle fight-and-flight style threat response, or whether those same stressors result in increased energy and higher performance.
The evidence comes, in part, from “mindset intervention” experiments developed by David Yeager, a mindset researcher at the University of Texas, in which students listened to a brief talk on the energetic benefits of stress immediately prior to a stressful examination. Students who heard evidence of the upside of stress had improved recall and focus because they viewed stress as an ally rather than an enemy. Those who received the “intervention” not only scored better than those who didn’t, but their grades remained significantly higher throughout the academic year.
McGonigal isn’t denying the debilitating impact of stress. It can undermine your ability to cope and harm mental and physical health, nor does she discount the evidence-based benefits of mindfulness as a tool to manage stress. Her point is that for most of us, most of the time, viewing stress as harmful increases the risk of feeling overwhelmed and hopeless when facing stressful situations. Our fear of stress is the source of its power to harm our health. Her advice is that rather than seeking to avoid or control stress, we can choose to change our relationship to it. She argues that welcoming anxiety and stress, seeing it as a natural source of energy and alertness, can boost confidence and improve resilience.
She reports on a Gallop World Poll spanning 121 countries which showed that the happiest people were not those who report less stress, but those who manage high stress without becoming depressed. The “stress paradox” is her term for the discovery that high stress correspond with distress, and also with a sense of meaning and accomplishment.
When you take this view, life doesn’t become less stressful, but it can become more meaningful. Our culture often celebrates a risk-free life of ease and comfort. McGonigal suggests that we find greater satisfaction from challenging ourselves to meet uncertain goals. Quoting from Antonella Della Fave, she concludes that “the more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning and community”.
In this month’s blogpost I’ve introduced this radical shift in thinking about stress; next month I’ll describe McGonigal’s recommendations for HOW we can build a richer, more authentic life by speaking out about our stress and reaching out to serve others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike MacConnell, founder of Reflective Mediation, is an accredited family mediator, conflict coach, educator and author. He is the highest-ranked mediator on Google in the greater Toronto area, with over 180 5-star reviews. To book your free consultation click here.
