Kelly McGonigal: How to make stress your friend

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

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(Applause)

I have a confession to make,

But first, I want you to make
a little confession to me.

In the past year,
I want you to just raise your hand

if you've experienced relatively
little stress. Anyone?

How about a moderate amount of stress?

Who has experienced a lot of stress?
Yeah. Me too.

But that is not my confession.

My confession is this:
I am a health psychologist,

and my mission is to help people
be happier and healthier.

But I fear that something
I've been teaching for the last 10 years

is doing more harm than good,
and it has to do with stress.

For years I've been telling people,
stress makes you sick.

It increases the risk of everything from
the common cold to cardiovascular disease.

Basically, I've turned stress
into the enemy.

But I have changed my mind about stress,
and today,

I want to change yours.

Let me start with the study that made me
rethink my whole approach to stress.

This study tracked 30,000 adults
in the United States for eight years,

and they started by asking people,

"How much stress have you
experienced in the last year?"

They also asked,

"Do you believe that stress
is harmful for your health?"

And then they used public death records
to find out who died.

(Laughter)

Okay. Some bad news first.

People who experienced
a lot of stress in the previous year

had a 43 percent increased risk of dying.

But that was only true for the people

who also believed that stress
is harmful for your health.

(Laughter)

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 you.

(Laughter)

That is over 20,000 deaths a year.

Now, if that estimate is correct,

that would make believing stress is bad
for you the 15th largest cause of death

in the United States last year,

killing more people than skin cancer,
HIV/AIDS and homicide.

(Laughter)

You can see why this study freaked me out.

Here I've been spending so much energy
telling people

stress is bad for your health.

So this study got me wondering:

Can changing how you think about stress
make you healthier?

And here the science says yes.

When you change your mind about stress,
you can change

your body's response to stress.

Now to explain how this works,
I want you all to pretend

that you are participants
in a study designed to stress you out.

It's called the social stress test.

You come into the laboratory,

and you're told you have to give
a five-minute impromptu speech

on your personal weaknesses
to a panel of expert evaluators

sitting right in front of you,

and to make sure you feel the pressure,

there are bright lights and
a camera in your face, kind of like this.

And the evaluators have been trained
to give you discouraging,

non-verbal feedback like this.
(Laughter)

Now that you're sufficiently demoralized,
time for part two: a math test.

And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter
has been trained to harass you during it.

Now we're going to all do this together.
It's going to be fun. For me.

Okay. I want you all to count backwards
from 996 in increments of seven.

You're going to do this out loud
as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go!

Audience: (Counting)

Go faster. Faster please. You're
going too slow. Stop. Stop, stop, stop.

That guy made a mistake. We
are going to have to start all over again.

(Laughter)

You're not very good at this, are you?
Okay, so you get the idea.

Now, if you were actually in this study,
you'd probably be a little stressed out.

Your heart might be pounding,
you might be breathing faster,

maybe breaking out into a sweat.

And normally,
we interpret these physical changes

as anxiety or signs that we aren't
coping very well with the pressure.

But what if you viewed them instead
as signs that your body was energized,

was preparing you to meet this challenge?

Now that is exactly what participants
were told in a study conducted

at Harvard University. Before
they went through the social stress test,

they were taught to rethink
their stress response as helpful.

That pounding heart
is preparing you for action.

If you're breathing faster,
it's no problem.

It's getting more oxygen to your 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,
but the most fascinating finding to me

was how their physical stress
response changed.

Now, in a typical stress response,
your heart rate goes up,

and your blood vessels constrict
like this.

And this is one of the reasons that
chronic stress is sometimes associated

with cardiovascular disease.

It's not really healthy
to be in this state all the time.

But in the study, when participants
viewed their stress response as helpful,

their blood vessels stayed relaxed
like this.

Their heart was still pounding, but this
is a much healthier

cardiovascular profile.

It actually looks a lot like what happens
in moments of joy and courage.

Over a lifetime of stressful experiences,
this one biological change

could be the difference between a
stress-induced heart attack at age 50

and living well into your 90s.

And this is really what the new science
of stress reveals,

that how you think about stress matters.

So my goal as a health psychologist
has changed.

I no longer want
to get rid of your stress.

I want to make you better at stress.
And we just did a little intervention.

If you raised your hand and said you'd
had a lot of stress in the last year,

we could have saved your life,

because hopefully the next time
yo,ur heart is pounding from stress

you're going to remember this talk
and you're going to think to yourself,

this is my body helping me
rise to this challenge.

And when you view stress in that way,

your body believes you, and
your stress response becomes healthier.

Now I said I have over a decade of
demonizing stress to redeem myself from,

so we are going to do
one more intervention.

I want to tell you about

one of the most under-appreciated
aspects of the stress response,

and the idea is this:
Stress makes you social.

To understand this side of stress,
we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin,

and I know 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.

But this is a very small part of what
oxytocin is involved in.

Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone.

It fine-tunes your brain's
social instincts.

It primes you to do things
that strengthen close relationships.

Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact
with your friends and family.

It enhances your empathy.

It even makes you more willing to help
and support the people you care about.

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.

Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out
as part of the stress response.

It's as much a part of
your stress response

as the adrenaline
that makes your heart pound.

And when oxytocin is released
in the stress response,

it is motivating you to seek support.

Your biological stress response
is nudging you to

tell someone how you feel
instead of bottling it up.

Your stress response wants to
make sure you notice

when someone else in your life is
struggling so that you can

support each other.
When life is difficult,

your stress response wants you
to be surrounded by

people who care about you.

Okay, so how is knowing this side of
stress going to make you healthier?

Well, oxytocin doesn't only act
on your brain. It also acts on your body,

and one of its main roles in your body
is to protect your cardiovascular system

from the effects of stress.

It's a natural anti-inflammatory.

It also helps your blood vessels
stay relaxed during stress.

But my favorite effect on the body
is actually on the heart.

Your heart has receptors for this hormone,
and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate

and heal from any stress-induced damage.

This stress hormone strengthens
your heart,

and the cool thing is
that all of these physical benefits

of oxytocin are enhanced
by social contact and social support,

so when you reach out to others under
stress, either to seek support

or to help someone else,
you release more of this hormone,

your stress response becomes healthier,

and you actually
recover faster from stress.

I find this amazing,
that your stress response

has a built-in mechanism
for stress resilience,

and that mechanism is human connection.

I want to finish by telling you
about one more study.

And listen up,
because this study could also save a life.

This study tracked about
1,000 adults in the United States,

and they ranged in age from 34 to 93,
and they started the study by asking,

"How much stress
have you experienced in the last year?"

They also asked,
"How much time have you spent

helping out friends, neighbors,
people in your community?"

And then they used public records for
the next five years to find out who died.

Okay, so the bad news first:

For every major stressful
life experience,

like financial difficulties
or family crisis,

that increased the risk of dying
by 30 percent.

But -- and I hope you
are expecting a but by now --

but that wasn't true for everyone.

People who spent time caring for others
showed absolutely

no stress-related increase in dying. Zero.

Caring created resilience.

And so we see once again
that the harmful effects of stress

on your health are not inevitable.

How you think and how you act
can transform your experience of stress.

When you choose to view
your stress response as helpful,

you create the biology of courage.

And when you choose
to connect with others under stress,

you can create resilience.

Now I wouldn't necessarily ask
for more stressful experiences in my life,

but this science has given me
a whole new appreciation for stress.

Stress gives us access to our hearts.

The compassionate heart that finds joy
and meaning in connecting with others,

and yes, your pounding physical heart,
working so hard

to give you strength and energy,

and when you choose to view stress
in this way,

you're not just getting better at stress,

you're actually making
a pretty profound statement.

You're saying that you can trust
yourself to handle life's challenges,

and you're remembering
that you don't have to face them alone.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing,
what you're telling us.

It seems amazing to me
that a belief about stress

can make so much difference
to someone's life expectancy.

How would that extend to advice,
like, if someone is making

a lifestyle choice between,
say, a stressful job

and a non-stressful job,
does it matter which way they go?

It's equally wise to go
for the stressful job

so long as you believe
that you can handle it, in some sense?

Kelly McGonigal: Yeah,
and one thing we know for certain

is that chasing meaning
is better for your health

than trying to avoid discomfort.

And so I would say
that's really the best way

to make decisions, is go after
what it is that creates meaning

in your life and then trust yourself
to handle the stress that follows.

Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Kelly.
It's pretty cool.

KM: Thank you.

(Applause)