Why Stress Can Actually Be Good For You For years we've been told how unhealthy stress can be and how important it is to manage our stress. Turns out, everything we thought we knew about stress might actually be wrong.

As a high-performing entrepreneur, there are few things more irritating than being told to work less and manage your stress. You're building a business, which by its very nature requires a lot of time and is stressful.

Here's the good news. Health psychologist and author of the best-selling book The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, Kelly McGonigal, has one mission: To help people be happier and healthier.

For many years this meant sharing the message that stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, she turned stress into the enemy. But thanks to some ground-breaking studies, Kelly changed her mind. As it turns out, stress doesn't kill you. Thinking that stress will kill you is the real killer.

Don't view stress as harmful

Kelly's opinion of stress started shifting after a ground-breaking study in the US tracked 30 000 adults for eight years. At the start of the study, participants were asked how much stress they had experienced in the last year, and if they believed stress was harmful to their health. They then used public death records to find out who died.

Here's the bad news: People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% higher chance of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful.

People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful to their health were no more likely to die than people with absolutely no stress in their lives. In fact, the focus group who had experienced stress but didn't view it as harmful actually had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study.

Change your response to stress

Other studies have revealed that changing your mind about stress can change your body's response to it. You can make stress good for you. In one Harvard study, participants were placed in a stressful situation but told that the stress response was good and would help them cope with the situation.

Briefed that all the physical signs of stress were helping them to stay focused and perform at their peak — including a heightened heart rate — the participants had a different physiological reaction to someone who believes their stress response is bad.

In a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up and your blood vessels constrict. Constricted vessels are a factor in cardiovascular disease; chronic stress is sometimes associated with heart attacks. It's not 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. Their heart was still pounding, but their cardiovascular profile looked more 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 50 and living well into your 90s.

Stress also releases oxytocin, which fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen relationships by making you crave physical contact with your friends and family, enhancing your empathy, and making you more willing to help and support people you care about. So, when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it's motivating you to seek support.

How will knowing this side of stress make you healthier? Oxytocin also acts on your body. One of its main roles is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory that also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. It even helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage.

Pulling it all together

The harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and act can transform your experience of stress.

When you 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. Stress gives us access to our hearts, from the compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and to the pounding physical heart, working so hard to give us strength and energy.

When you view stress this way, you're not just getting better at it, you're actually making a profound statement that you trust yourself to handle life's challenges and that you don't have to face them alone.