Is there a way to benefit from a stressful situation?

The study analysed how people felt when they were stressed, their attitudes towards stress and then attempted to find a correlation with death. Surprisingly, the people who were stressed and actually believed that stress was detrimental to their health had a higher risk of death as compared to those people who were stressed but did not consider it harmful.

Thus, as Kelly says, the study proves that it isn’t stress that causes death but our belief system that stress is harmful and hence by changing the way we think about stress, we can change our body’s response to stress as well.

Explaining the common psychological concept of ‘fight or flight’, Kelly explains to her audience that stress responses of a fast heart rate, faster breath and so on, should be used to take on any challenge since our body is biologically at its best state to handle stress.

The negative side of stress is the restriction in blood vessels that is correlated to cardiovascular diseases but when people learn to see stress as a positive phenomenon, the blood vessels do not constrict as much.

Oxytocin is a hormone that is often related to relationships and is sometimes called the cuddle hormone. However, this hormone is also released during stressful situations and is known to strengthen the heart and heal it from the effects of stress and thus by releasing more of this hormone during stressful situations, you are indirectly increasing your resilience to stress.

Thus, Kelly concludes that priming our mind in a stressful situation can benefit us in the long run.

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