Metadata
- Author: Kelly McGonigal
- Full Title:: The Upside of Stress
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Finished date:: 2023-02-02
Highlights
“If you have butterflies in your stomach, invite them into your heart.” (Location 54)
increased risk applied only to people who also believed that stress was harming their health. (Location 73)
The most threatening images (say, a lung cancer patient dying in a hospital bed) actually increase smokers’ positive attitudes toward smoking.4 The reason? The images trigger fear, and what better way to calm down than to smoke a cigarette? (Location 114)
The latest science reveals that stress can make you smarter, stronger, and more successful. It helps you learn and grow. It can even inspire courage and compassion. (Location 141)
The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it. (Location 144)
I no longer want to help you get rid of your stress—I want to make you better at stress. (Location 145)
stress—in part because the word has become a catchall term for anything we don’t want to experience and everything that’s wrong with the world. (Location 192)
you can’t create a meaningful life without experiencing some stress. (Location 215)
Cortisol helps turn sugar and fat into energy and improves the ability (Location 335)
suppresses (Location 336)
growth. (Location 337)
A higher growth index—meaning more DHEA—helps people thrive under stress. (Location 345)
One study found that within ten years of entering the industry, 100 percent of investment bankers developed at least one condition associated with burnout, such as insomnia, alcoholism, or depression. (Location 481)
Walton selected social belonging as his focus because he knew that the sense of not belonging—at school, at a workplace, or in any community that matters to you—is widespread. (Location 532)
Fleeing and fighting are not the only strategies your body supports. As with humans themselves, the stress response has evolved, (Location 883)
Your heart has special receptors for oxytocin, which helps heart cells regenerate and repair from any micro-damage. When your stress response includes oxytocin, stress can literally strengthen your heart. (Location 975)
As your brain tries to process your experience, you may find yourself unable to stop thinking about what happened. You might feel an impulse to talk with someone about it, or to pray about it. If things went well, you might replay the experience in your mind, remembering everything you did and how it worked out. If things went poorly, you might try to understand what happened, imagine what you could have done differently, and play out other possible outcomes. (Location 992)
research shows that expecting to learn from a stressful experience can shift your physical stress response (Location 1009)
The higher the percentage of people who said they had felt a great deal of stress the day before, the higher that nation’s life expectancy and GDP. (Location 1120)
In contrast, the researchers reported that among individuals who appeared to be the most unhappy, experiencing high levels of shame and anger and low levels of joy, “there was a notable lack of stress.” (Location 1129)
In one large epidemiological study, middle-aged men who reported higher levels of boredom were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack over the next twenty years. (Location 1163)
Consider that in a 2014 survey by the Harvard School of Public Health, the most commonly named sources of everyday stress included juggling schedules, running errands, commuting, social media, and household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and repairs. These are normal and expected parts of life, but we treat them as if they are unreasonable impositions, keeping our lives from how they should really be. It was this mindset—not some objective measure of stressful events—that best predicted the risk of death among the men in the Normative Aging Study (Location 1205)
The takeaway should be to change your relationship to the everyday experiences you perceive as hassles. The same experiences that give rise to daily stress can also be sources of uplift or meaning—but we must choose to view them that way. (Location 1210)
Cohen and Sherman call this a “narrative of personal adequacy.” In other words, when you reflect on your values, the story you tell yourself about stress shifts. You see yourself as strong and able to grow from adversity. (Location 1239)
In a study at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, for example, participants were given bracelets that said, “Remember the values.” (Location 1275)
In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. (Location 1411)
Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping (Location 1425)
strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. (Location 1427)
As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “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.” (Location 1429)
“If you were climbing Everest, you can imagine it would be cold, and there’d be some nights it would be dark, and you’d be tired,” Crum thought. “You’d be pretty miserable. But what did you expect? You’re climbing Everest.” (Location 1451)
You are most liable to feel like a victim of the stress in your life when you forget the context the stress is unfolding in. (Location 1458)
The most meaningful challenges in your life will come with a few dark nights. (Location 1459)
When you think life should be less stressful, feeling stressed can also seem like a sign that you are inadequate: If you were strong enough, smart enough, or good enough, then you wouldn’t be stressed. Stress becomes a sign of personal failure rather than evidence that you are human. This kind of thinking explains, in part, why viewing stress as harmful increases the risk of depression. (Location 1464)
Studies show that when people are told, “You’re the kind of person whose performance improves under pressure,” their actual performance improves by 33 percent. It doesn’t matter whether the feedback is completely random. What (Location 1683)
The increased inflammation and blood pressure can be helpful in the short term of an emergency but can accelerate aging and disease when chronic. This does not seem to be true of the cardiovascular changes you experience during a challenge response, which put your body in a much healthier state. (Location 1733)
If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response. (Location 1771)
people often fail to realize one resource they have in every stressful situation: their own stress response. Because people view the stress response as harmful, (Location 1778)
signs of shame and anxiety, like fidgeting, touching their face, or looking down. (Location 1853)
Among people with an anxiety disorder who were encouraged to embrace their anxiety, a stronger physical stress response was associated with more confidence and better performance under pressure and social scrutiny. (Location 1944)
Everyone experiences an increase in heart rate and adrenaline. People with anxiety disorders perceive those changes differently. They may be more aware of the sensations of their heart beating or the changes in their breathing. And they make more negative assumptions about those sensations, fearing a panic attack. But their physical response is not fundamentally different. (Location 1951)
Caring for others triggers the biology of courage and creates hope. (Location 2117)
Whether you are overwhelmed by your own stress or the suffering of others, the way to find hope is to connect, not to escape. (Location 2142)
When individuals feel time constrained, they should become more generous with their time—despite their inclination to be less so.”6 (Location 2159)
People who have suffered the most also help the most. (Location 2348)
The defeat response is a biologically hardwired response to repeated victimization that leads to loss of appetite, social isolation, depression, and even suicide. Its main effect is to make you withdraw. (Location 2358)
it kicks in only when you feel that you have been beaten by your circumstances or rejected by your community. In other words, when you think there is nothing left that you can do and nobody who cares.21 As awful as it sounds, a defeat response is nature’s way of removing you from the picture so you don’t use up communal resources. (Location 2361)
Participants who were genetically biased not to have a tend-and-befriend response got the biggest health benefit of being prosocial. (Location 2411)
nothing is more universal than the experience of stress. (Location 2509)
Research shows that modern forms of communication contribute to this misperception by encouraging us to present a positive picture of our lives. People prefer, or feel pressured, to post good news, happy photos, and positive milestones on social media. Even though most people are aware of their own tendency to do this, they underestimate the degree to which others are also putting on a positive show.46 So you can find yourself scrolling through upbeat posts from friends and family, wondering why your life is so much more chaotic, disappointing, or difficult than theirs. This misperception leads to a greater sense of isolation and less satisfaction with life. Studies show that spending time on social media, including Facebook, can increase loneliness and decrease satisfaction with life.47 (Location 2537)
A Sleepless Night Before Surgery One of my students, Cynthia, was in the hospital for a routine surgery. The night before the surgery, she couldn’t sleep. Even though everyone expected the surgery to go well, it required general anesthesia. Cynthia was anxious about being put under, worrying about all the things she couldn’t control. She was a mom, and worst-case scenarios always found their way into her thinking. Since she was awake, and the worrying wasn’t helping, Cynthia decided to try thinking about common humanity. First, she thought about the surgery itself and the anxiety she felt about not being able to control the experience. Then she brought to mind all the other people who were also facing medical procedures they might feel anxious about. People who had to start another round of chemo tomorrow. People waiting for the results of medical tests. People who didn’t even know if they would be able to get treatment. People without insurance, waiting on a transplant list, or trying to get into a clinical trial. She thought about all that anxiety and about how many countless people were in the same boat with her. She felt a sense of connection to them. The awareness of even a nameless, faceless community who shared her same feelings was reassuring. Then Cynthia thought about her present experience of not being able to sleep because of worry. She thought about how many other people were probably awake at that very moment, also kept up by fear or worst-case thinking. How many other people had to get up the next morning to do something they didn’t want to do? Not just surgery, but anything. An exam. A difficult conversation. Burying a loved one. This experience of lying awake, as alone as she felt, connected her to countless other people who were sharing this experience with her. Cynthia was struck by how brave they all were, and felt a sense of her own bravery by extension. She chose the phrase “May we all know our own strength” as an offering to all of them, herself included. When she got out of bed the next morning, she had the feeling that she was one of many, part of a group of people choosing to face that day’s challenges. (Location 2571)
courageous vulnerability—to (Location 2646)
people with no trauma in their past are significantly less satisfied with their lives than people who have experienced the average number of traumatic events. (Location 2771)
People who had faced the most adversity kept their hands in the longest. (Location 2811)
post-traumatic growth. (Location 2980)
- Note: But it can be a self dellusion…
“We are all broken people, in some way. For most of us, the big question is, how do you live a good life despite, or within, that brokenness? All of us are trying to figure out how to live with things that hurt.” (Location 3172)
Vicarious growth was most commonly reported by professionals working with people who had suffered greatly: (Location 3198)
One of the biggest barriers to vicarious resilience is pity. When you pity someone, you feel sorry for their suffering but do not see their strength, and you do not see yourself in their story. In many ways, pity is a safer emotion than genuine empathy. It lets you protect yourself from sharing too closely in someone else’s distress. (Location 3209)
The process of learning and growing from another person’s suffering seems to require being affected by that suffering. (Location 3213)