Making Stress Your Friend - Kelly McGonigal

On September 4, 2013, Ted Talk uploaded a brand new video featuring Kelly McGonigal. Being a health psychologist herself, Kelly had always been engraving into people's heads to avoid stress and to take it as your enemy, since no matter what things are going on in your busy life, one aspect is always present to some extent: stress.

Stress deprives our brains of consciousness and, we, with the hope of relieving ourselves, rack them. However, there are several other perspectives on stress as mentioned by Kelly, all according to studies conducted throughout the globe that proved her 10 years of work experience wrong. A study at Harvard University put some youngsters through a social stress test to have a look at various ways they deal with it. Kelly mentions that when you are under stress, you can feel your heart pounding and sweat forming on the crease of your forehead which many describe as anxiety. It also mentioned how your brain releases a hormone named Oxytocin -named the cuddle hormone- when you get anxious, which brings forth compassion within you, overall making you more interactional with those nearby.

Moreover, McGonigal mentions how the reason for premature deaths amongst the population of the USA may not be stress alone, but having the idea in mind that stress causes harm to your body. According to the previously mentioned study, those who believed stress would not cause much harm to their state were 43% less likely to pass away than those who did. Personally, this reasoning does stand the test of time as your perspective changes the outcomes of all that you can imagine. McGonigal also made the effort to bring into view the amount of stress the youth at school go through -very often ignored- and suggested for teachers to give students an insight on how to encourage positive stress helping them deal with the stress mechanism better.

Positive Stress. Never in the entirety of my existence did I ever hear such a thing. Our planet is full of stress, all around us, from that tall office building you view on the way to school where employees stress over getting their work done to be able to enjoy the comfort of their homes, to school life itself. Adopting the theory that such stress is beneficial to you, brings forth biological courage as choosing to connect helps create resilience. Though I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful moments in my life, this Talk has successfully handed me a new appreciation of stress.

When you choose to view stress this way, you are not just getting better at stress, you are actually making a profound statement.

You might be wondering, how exactly can stress be seen as helpful for your body. Well, it's mostly psychological and includes tricking your brain into thinking that stress is making you energized and this fast pacing heart is just a sign of you preparing to face a challenge. Going back McGonigal discussed Oxytocin, but she later mentions that it is also a natural anti-inflammatory as it helps your blood vessels stay relaxed thereby reducing the chances of heart attacks.

Kelly McGonigal has served us with a new aspect of stress, and we can use this knowledge to get better at handling stress by gradually moving towards a rather positive attitude even if it's difficult at first with our fixed mindsets. Who knows in the near future, you might be able to lead a healthy and wise life following the ideas of Kelly and befriending stress and viewing it as a companion.

If a glass is half empty, you can learn how to see it half full.

- An optimist