ASA Blog Post

Making Stress Your Friend

amiles

Written by Aubrey Winn

I don’t know about you, but for most of my life I’ve heard that stress is bad for your health. A quick Google search for “stress” pulls up tips on how to reduce stress, articles about how stress affects your body and pieces about the negative effects of stress on peoples’ lives.

However, in this TED talk, psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenges us to view our stress in a different way. She maintains that if we view our body’s physiological signs of stress as our body simply preparing us for action and success, the negative effects of stress virtually disappear.

In addition to teaching us how to shift the view of our mountains of stress into much more manageable molehills, McGonigal also explores how the simple act of supporting others during stressful situations helps us become much more resilient and, in turn, manage our own stress better.

The reassurance that “we can trust ourselves to handle life’s challenges” is a welcome reminder for me, and one that I’ll happily fall back on the next time that life’s stressors seem to be piling up.