Three Takeaways from "The Upside of Stress" That Changed How I Think About Pressure
A recap of my conversation with my co-host Amy McDuffie on the I Think I Can Be Happier podcast.
If you've ever been told to "just relax" right before something stressful and thought easier said than done, this post is for you.
My co-host Amy McDuffie and I devoted an episode of our podcast, I Think I Can Be Happier, to a book I think should be required reading for everybody: The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal, PhD. I came across it accidentally in a buy-nothing group in my town (shout out to Fairfield Shares), and it has changed the way I talk to myself before hard things, the way I prepare for them, and the way I show up for the people I coach.
We even joked on the episode about turning the whole podcast into a Hannah and Amy book club, where one of us reads a book and the other one doesn't, and then we see who can convince who. (Don't be surprised if we actually do this.)
Here are the three takeaways I want to pull out of that conversation. If you only have time for one of them, scroll to the third.
1. Your belief about stress changes how stress affects you.
Kelly opens the book (and her TED talk) with a study that genuinely floored me. Researchers tracked 30,000 adults for eight years. The people who reported a lot of stress AND believed stress was harmful to their health had a significantly higher risk of dying (43%!!). The people who reported just as much stress but didn't see it as harmful had some of the lowest mortality rates of anyone in the study. Lower than the people with very little stress. What???
Kelly explains another study where participants’ stress responses were measured with the Social Stress Test. Participants had to give a short speech about themselves and solve math problems while the “judges” (researchers in disguise) huffed, puffed, and criticized about their performance. Super stressful! Some of the participants were taught that the physical sensations of stress, the pounding heart, the faster breathing, the sweating, were signs their body was preparing them to rise to a challenge. The blood vessels of the people who learned this stayed relaxed under pressure. They shared the same sensations as the other participants, but their blood vessels responded the way bodies do when we feel joy and courage. Same situation and same sensations, but a different physical outcome because they learned how to interpret their stress sensations as something useful.
I had to put the book down for a minute when I read these studies. When Amy asked me what I thought, I told her honestly: "I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that just your belief about something could change how your blood vessels react. Like, that sounds kind of crazy." Doesn’t it? But the research holds up, unbelieveably.
If you want a quick taste before committing to the book, Kelly's TED talk covers this study in about fifteen minutes and is one of the most-watched TED talks of all time.
2. The physical sensations of stress and excitement are identical. You get to choose how to read them.
This is the takeaway that connects Kelly's work to mine as an executive function coach. One of my favorite executive function skills is flexible thinking (check out my blog post on it to find out why!). It's the skill that lets us shift perspective on situations or actions when our first interpretation isn't serving us. What Kelly is teaching, at its core, is flexible thinking applied to the body.
A pounding heart can mean I'm falling apart, I can't do this. It can also mean my body is getting me ready to rise to this challenge. The sensation is the same. The interpretation is the choice. We have a choice. I’m not saying it’s an easy choice, but I’m saying we truly do have a choice (even if you feel like you don’t in the moment).
This is one of my favorite passages from the book, which I read to Amy on the show:
"Whatever the sensations of stress are, worry less about trying to make them go away and focus more on what you are going to do with the energy, strength, and drive that stress gives you. Your body is providing you access to all your resources to help you rise to this challenge. Instead of taking a deep breath to calm down, take a deep breath to sense the energy that is available to you."
Kelly McGonigal, PhDI have experienced this often, myself. When I started doing webinars and recording podcast episode interviews a number of years ago, I would dread it all day. My racing heart, my shaking hands, my distracted brain, my inability to eat. My whole day was ruined before I even sat down to record. This was before I read the Upside of Stress, but I remembered hearing about this idea of interpreting anxiety or nervousness as excitement, so I began practicing this kind of flexible thinking. It helped me realize: Wait, I do have a choice in this. I can decide to feel excited.
Over five years later, with dozens and dozens of speaking events behind me, my heart rate still hits 95 - 100 beats per minute before every webinar or live presentation. But instead of reading that as evidence I was about to fail, that I was too nervous, or that I wasn’t good enough, I learned to read it as evidence I was excited, I was prepared, and I was ready to get this show on the road. I explained this experience to my audience recently when I was presenting at our local public library. I noticed on my smart watch just before we started that my heart rate was 100, my knees were a little shaky, and I couldn’t eat much beforehand, but I was so excited! I love speaking, especially to parents of college-bound seniors! Not nervous AT ALL. Same data, different story, completely different experience leading up to the event. Just like those poor people who suffered through the Social Stress Test. It’s how we interpret it that makes the difference.
Please know that this isn't toxic positivity or me pretending stress isn't real. Life is stressful. Stress is absolutely unavoidable. This is an honest reframe based on the fact that excitement and anxiety produce nearly identical physical sensations. If we tell ourselves this, we’re not lying, we just updating the caption to our experience. We might as well try to take advantage of this power.
On the episode, Amy reminded me that I'd actually passed this exact reframe along to her years ago, after I had begun leading them but before Amy had done one. She had told me how nervous she was feeling, and I said something like “What if that's just excitement?” It stuck with her, even till today! Hearing her remind me of this felt like a full-circle moment, and interestingly, there is a connection between stress and connecting with others for help.
Kelly shared how one of the things our stress response actually wants us to do is connect with other people. The stress hormone, oxytocin, gets released alongside the adrenaline and cortisol, and part of what it does is gently push us toward each other. Doing scary things next to someone you trust can make them less scary. So, another reason asking for help is a good thing!
3. The goal isn't a stress-free life. It's a meaningful one.
If I had to pick one takeaway from the entire book, this is it. It sounds contradictory, but a stressful life is a meaningful life.
Near the end of the book, Kelly writes that the goal is not a stress-free life because that's not possible. The goal is a life where you have the tools and the self-trust to move through stress toward what matters to you. Learning we can make the choice and learning how to make that choice can help us feel more powerful, propelling us towards what we want.
There's a quote from the psychologist Susan David that I come back to constantly, and it guides me in many aspects of my life:
"Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life."
Susan David, PhDFinding this meaning and the strength to get through the tough stuff can be supported by our executive functioning. Avoidance is one of the most common patterns I see in coaching. The future feels stressful, so we don't think about it or plan for it. The conversation feels stressful, so we don't have it. The task feels stressful, so it stays on the list for the eighth week in a row. Avoid, avoid, avoid. And underneath all of it is usually a belief that stress itself is the problem. It feels uncomfortable, so we avoid it. Could we shift our thinking about that discomfort and begin to believe we can tolerate it? That we can do the hard things?
The actual cost of avoiding stress is missed opportunities, narrower choices, and a smaller life than the one we want. Or, as I put it to Amy at the end of our conversation:
"We have a lot more agency in how we react to stress or how we use stress. We have a lot of power there, and I think we are denying ourselves a lot of power by not taking advantage of that."
None of this is easy. I'm not pretending otherwise, I promise. Reading a pounding heart as readiness to take action instead of failure, choosing meaning over comfort, sitting with the discomfort that comes from caring about something is super hard work. Like all things that are hard, it’s the kind of work that takes practice. But it builds upon itself and the more you do it, the more you trust yourself to do it again. And the life that opens up on the other side is, in my experience, a much more interesting one. And, way more fun!
A few places to go next
If any of this resonated, the book is genuinely worth your time. So is the TED talk if you don’t have time for the book. Here are a handful of places to keep going:
Kelly McGonigal's website, where you can find her books, her writing, and her course work
Kelly's TED talk, "How to Make Stress Your Friend", about fifteen minutes long
Susan David's website and TED talk on emotional courage, if takeaway #3 is the one that stuck with you
I haven’t read them yet, but Dave Evans and Bill Burnett have two books on the topic of living a life of meaning: Design Your Life and How To Live a Meaningful Life
Episode 2 of I Think I Can Be Happier where Amy and I had this conversation in full
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