Psychologist from Stanford University: How to turn stress into 'you'?

Stress - it causes your heart to "sting", breathing and sweating all over your forehead. While stress is considered an "enemy" to health, many new studies have shown that stress only gets worse when you believe it.

When Kelly McGonigal first presented to the audience that the belief in the negative effects of stress - rather than the nature of stress - is a serious health threat, many laugh.

However, by the end of the talk, most audiences were willing to accept that the change in perception of stress rather than rejecting it could save them from an early death.

Video of Kelly McGonigal 's speech has received over 11 million views on TED Talks and over 4.8 million views on YouTube. "How To Make Stress Your Friend?" (Translating: How to turn stress into you? ) Is really a breakthrough change in our perception of stress and if we stop worrying about stress, the body can produce reactions. naturally or not? The following section will help readers understand.

Video "How to turn stress into a friend?"

In the first part, McGonigal conducted a study to review his entire approach to stress. The study followed 30,000 adults in the US for 8 years and started by asking people: "In the past year, how much stress have you suffered?", "Do you believe stress is harmful to your health? ", s then, use the Public Death Records to see who died. The results showed that those who experienced a lot of stress in the past year had a 43% increased risk of death.

Next, the researchers estimated that in eight years of monitoring deaths, 182,000 Americans died young (equivalent to more than 20,000 deaths per year) not because of stress but because they believed that stress was harmful to them. . If that estimate is correct, the belief that harmful stress will rank 15th among the biggest causes of death in the US in the past year, "has caused more deaths than skin cancer, HIV / AIDS and other deaths. murder ".

"Stress makes you more fit" and the relationship with oxytoxin hormone

To understand this, let's clarify a hormone called oxytoxin , also known by another cute name as "hugging hormone" (love hormone, cuddly hormone). In fact, this is a neurological hormone that regulates the social instincts of the brain, helping guide people to do things to tighten relationships, making you crave physical contact with Family, friends, increase empathy, stimulate you to be more willing to help and support the people you care about.

Apart from the above, there is another aspect of oxytoxin not everyone understands. This is a stress hormone . Your pituitary gland secretes this substance as part of a stress response, which plays an important role in your stress response like adrenalin, making your heart beat so fast. "And when oxytocin is released in response to stress, it makes you seek help. The physiological response to stress motivates you to confide your feelings to someone instead of keeping it private , " making sure that You pay attention to your acquaintances who are in trouble and that you two can help each other. "When life becomes difficult, the response to stress wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you."

How do you know this aspect of stress makes you healthier? That's because oxytocin doesn't just affect your brain. It affects your whole body and works to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It is a natural antibiotic that helps your blood vessels relax when stressed. In addition, "your heart has receptors for this hormone and oxytoxin helps your heart cells regenerate by healing from the stresses caused by stress . This stress hormone makes your heart stronger. And the great thing is that all the physical benefits of oxytoxin are enhanced by communication. " So when you go to other people under the pressure of stress whether it's for help or to help someone, you release more of these hormones. Your stress response becomes healthier and you recover more quickly after stress. "I find this very amazing that your stress response has an endogenous mechanism to recover from stress and that mechanism is the connection between people."

About Kelly McGonigal

Kelly McGonigal is a psychologist from Stanford University. Through books, courses and workshops, McGonigal helps us better understand the latest scientific findings in psychology, neuroscience and medicine. Her latest book, The Willpower Instinct , offers the latest discoveries about motivation, temptation and procrastination, as well as a number of solutions to practice habits, patience to overcome challenges. and succeed by changing.