You need to stress better –

Stress is always blamed for being harmful to health, conditioning our well-being and even directly influencing the manifestation of symptoms or interpersonal conflicts. Nevertheless What makes stress so harmful? Could we use it to our advantage?

Dr. Kelly McGonigal in her explains a very revealing experiment. They followed a sample of 30,000 adults in the United States for 8 years, asking annually what level of stress they had experienced during the previous year. For those who had answered “high level of stress” an increased risk of death of 43% could be observed. However, what is interesting is reflected in a variable that included this experiment. Another question they asked was “Do you consider stress harmful to health?”. To those who answered no, did not increase the risk of death, even reduced it compared to people with less stress in the sample.

That is to say, Those who managed and understood stress as something positive lived longer and better than those who thought it was damaging their health and even those who reported not feeling stress or indicated lower levels. Therefore, stress was not a risk factor but a factor that potentiated the .

The physiological reactions (increased heart rate, increased respiration…) are the same, but the way of experiencing them changes enormously.

You can experience stress as a body preparation that will help you do your homework or as something pathological that makes you suffer. This will depend on how it affects your health. The reaction to great joy or excitement has many factors in common with well-managed stress, a great one does not imply suffering, suffering will be caused by the way we have to live it.

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Biologically, stress stimulates hormones such as oxytocin and adrenaline that make us more capable, more sociable, think faster and even face difficulties more effectively. In fact, as the doctor points out, oxytocin is a hormone that helps protect the cardiovascular system, especially when it is stimulated through social contact.

Imagine this situation, in an amusement park a person rides a roller coaster. The whole tour is waiting for him to stop, to slow down, covering his eyes and thinking that he could die… another person gets on the same attraction and understands that the tour is temporary (it will end in a few seconds) and he also knows that he has no control over neither the speed nor the course, so just stop controlling and enjoy its adrenaline rush.

The same thing happens to us with pain, it is the management of the stimulus and not the stressful stimulus that really hurts us.

Sometimes things happen in life that we really have no control over, moments in which we would like everything to slow down, we want it to be over as soon as possible. When you live this remember, everything is temporary, let go, don’t fight, and do your best. It is not necessary to suffer to offer your best version. Your discomfort will depend on the dramatic or fatalistic filter that you apply to what happens, all day-to-day stress is relative and temporary..

All this information leads us to a clear conclusion: when we are stressed and we experience it as something undesirable, unpleasant and dangerous, it will be very harmful for us. However, if we live it as a bodily preparation that helps us to face the task, and we also allow ourselves to lean on others. Stress stops being dangerous to become beneficial. It would not be about stressing less, it would be about stressing better.

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“There is a big difference between feeling stressed and mastering stress. Use stress to propel you in the direction you want; it can generate a tremendous transformation within you.”

Tony Robbins.

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