It’s true that stress can cause illness, both physical and emotional, but some psychologists are rethinking the long-held belief that all stress has a negative impact.
In a 2013 Ted Talk, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal explained that the way a person responds to stress impacts the outcome. For instance, during a stressful situation, your breathing may become rapid, your heart rate increases, and your blood vessels generally constrict. Rather than viewing these physical manifestations as negative, she advises taking a different approach to stress relief.1
McGonigal suggests that rapid breathing sends more oxygen to the brain, helping the body better prepare to meet a challenge. A 2012 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on perception of stress and its physical effect.2 Extracting information from the 1998 National Health Interview Survey and National Death Index mortality data through 2006, the researchers found that high amounts of stress and the perception that stress negatively impacts health are related to poor physical and mental health.
Reframing the picture
In the past, scientists believed the brain was unchangeable, but research has suggested otherwise. Gabrielle Pelicci, a holistic health and mind-body professor in Miami, explains that neuroplasticity allows the brain to change in relation to our behaviors. “What we do can change the response and physiology of the brain,” she says.
Pelicci explains that “reframing,” i.e., changing our attitude about stress, creates a physiological change in the body. “It switches the body from the sympathetic, i.e., fight or flight, nervous system to the parasympathetic, i.e., rest and digest, nervous system. It also boosts the immune system,” she says.
Also, stress exists on a spectrum. “The body doesn’t know whether you’re stressed from sitting in traffic or from chronic pain due to cancer,” Pelicci says. “It’s all the same for the body, regardless of the stressor. We have to make an effort to take a step back and see the situation through new eyes,” she says. “We can do this using mindfulness—a few minutes of meditation or deep breathing. Journaling is also a good tool. Fifteen minutes of writing down the stressful situation and then reading the entry to look for different perspectives and solutions.”
She adds that spending 15 minutes outside looking at the sea or sky creates some mental space and helps provide a “view from 20,000 feet.”
Pelicci also recommends converting stress into creative projects. “If we befriend our stress, we can channel the stress response into creative projects at home and work that’s a healthy, constructive way to ‘turn lemons into lemonade,’ ” she says. “Use the adrenaline of stress as fuel for that project you’ve been putting off—cleaning the closet, finishing that writing project, writing that song, running that half-marathon. There is a lot of energy in stress. You can use it destructively (drinking, smoking, fighting, etc.) or you can use it productively—writing, singing, dancing, painting.”
The whole idea is to bring the body back into homeostasis, Pelicci says.
Be patient in your efforts to befriend stress. Learning new behaviors takes time, and backsliding is always a possibility. “It takes 40 days to make it a habit and a year to make it permanent,” she says. “As we repeat healthy thoughts and behaviors over time, we create new neural pathways in the brain that allow us to have a healthy body and better well-being.”
1 McGonigal K. “How to Make Stress Your Friend.” https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend. Ted Conferences, LLC. Filmed June 2013. Accessed Nov. 2015.
2 Keller A, Litzelman K, Wisk LE, et al. Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health Psychol. 2012;31(5):677-84.