Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health? If you answered yes, you are not alone. In 1998, researchers asked thirty thousand adults in the United States how much stress they had experienced in the past year and whether they believed stress was harming their health. Eight years later, the researchers found that high levels of stress increased the risk of dying by 43%?but ONLY for those people who also BELIEVED that stress was harming their health.
Even moe fascinating, people who reported high levels of stress but who did not believe their stress was harmful were not more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than those with little stress.
This means that stress itself is not actually bad. It is the belief that stress is bad that is bad.
In her new book The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, shares that ?Over eight years, 182,000 Americans may have died prematurely because they believed that stress was harming their health. Over 20,000 deaths a year! According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would make ?believing stress is bad for you? the fifteenth-leading cause of death in the United States, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS, and homicide.?
This is big news indeed. And this finding unnerved Kelly very much, given she was spending a great deal of time and energy convincing people that stress was bad for their health.
Read more at?FORBES
