We are told that stress is bad for us. It is blamed for obesity, heart disease, stomach ulcers, insomnia, and the inability to concentrate just to name a few. But what if I told you that stress is not your enemy. Instead, it’s a friend here to help you not hurt you.

The most recent research on stress indicates that stress can make us smarter, stronger, and more successful. Stress can help you to face challenges and to learn and grow from those challenges.

Changing your mind about stress won’t just give you a better attitude about stress, it will make you healthier and happier. Rather than trying to reduce or avoid stress, the best thing to do may be to embrace it.

The new science of stress tells us not to try and eliminate stress. Instead, it tells us how to harness stress for better health, happiness, and a more meaningful life.

What is Stress?

“Stress arises when something you care about is at stake,” according to Stanford psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal. This is an often overlooked truth about stress: stress and meaning are inseparable. You don’t feel stressed about things you don’t care about.

That means stress is a guide to what is important in our lives. This is the Stress Paradox — rather than being a sign that something is wrong in our lives, stress can be an indicator of how engaged we are in the meaningful parts of our lives.

What is your mindset toward stress?

There are two basic mindsets toward stress. Psychologist Alia Crum developed a Stress Mindset Measure to assess which view individuals hold. Read through the two lists below to see which camp you fall into.

Stress is Harmful.

• Stress depletes my health and vitality.
• Stress debilitates my performance and productivity.
• Stress inhibits my ability to learn and grow.
• Stress is negative and should be avoided.

Stress is Enhancing.

• Stress enhances my performance and productivity.
• Stress improves my health and vitality.
• Stress enables learning and growth.
• Stress is positive and should be utilized.

You probably find you agree more with the statements indicating stress is harmful. Most men and women do. But what if I could change your mind and convince you that stress can be positive and should be utilized?

Why Does Stress Get a Bad Rap?

The distrust of stress is rooted in the “mismatch theory” — the idea that stress triggers a fight-or-flight response that was adaptive when our ancestors had to evade saber-toothed tigers, but which is maladaptive today. The idea does have some merit, but only if you assume that the fight-or-flight response is the only option open to humans, and it isn’t.

The Challenge-Response.

The challenge-response is another way our bodies can respond to stress. This response gives us the boost in energy and focus we need to perform in a challenging situation. Adrenaline rises and with it, heart rate and blood flow. The brain and muscles get the energy they need while the body gets a surge of feel-good hormones. It is similar to the fight-or-flight response, but with a few important distinctions. It produces focus without the fear. It also releases hormones that aid in recovery and learning.

I had not recognized my familiarity with this state until I recently read about it. As an acute care surgeon, I am often put into challenging situations. As I wait to start those operations, I feel butterflies in my stomach and my heart speeds up, but I don’t interpret that as fear. Instead, I would say I am excited to start. When I do start the operation, I am focused and completely absorbed in what I am doing. Time passes without my noticing it. I enter a flow state. That is all thanks of the challenge-response which gives me the energy, enhanced concentration, and confidence that allow me to perform at my best.

At those times, I don’t want to be super calm. I want to be “jazzed up,” because I know that will improve my performance. I feel like a race car revving up at the starting line. Why would I want to exchange that feeling of turbocharged power for a calm state? That would be like trading a Formula-1 racer for a Chevy. It might be a more sedate ride, but it is not going to win the checkered flag.

I’m Excited.

Waiting backstage for my opportunity to speak on the TEDx stage, I felt butterflies in my stomach, my heart pounded, my palm were sweaty and I kept shifting from one leg to the other literally shaking with nervous energy. The question is, should I tell myself “I’m nervous, calm down,” or “I’m excited!”

Thanks to the work of Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks, I knew the answer to that question. Dr. Books tested this very question by bringing people into the lab and having them prepare a speech. Half of the subjects were instructed to say to themselves, “I am calm.” The other half were encouraged to embrace their nervous energy and tell themselves, “I am excited.” And what happened?

Both groups reported feeling nervous, but the group that told themselves they were excited felt more confident and better able to handle the pressure. More importantly, a panel of judges blinded to which group the speakers were randomized to, rated those in the “I am excited” group as more persuasive, confident, competent, and persistent than those in the “I am Calm” group.

Waiting backstage, I told myself, “I’m excited. I can do this.” That the energy I was feeling was my body revving up to succeed. Rather than fighting the feeling and trying to calm down, I embraced my energy and tried to see it as something positive. You can be the judge of how well I did by watching my talk here.

The problem with trying to convince yourself you are calm is that, well, you aren’t. And trying to make yourself be something you are not convinces you that what you are feeling is wrong. This puts you into a threat mindset as you see the way you feel to be a threat to how you think you should feel. Adopting an “I am excited” attitude turns a threat into an opportunity. Your stress response becomes a resource that can help you achieve your goal and believe “I can do it.”

When you feel that nervous energy, racing heart, sweaty palms, and desire to run away, don’t try to fight against it. Instead welcome the feeling and tell yourself, “I am excited.” Then you can use the energy to best effect.

The Paradox of Stress

From 2005 to 2005, Gallup polled people from 121 countries to find out how stressed they were. They then computed a national stress index for each country and found a wide variation in the results. Then they wondered if a nation’s stress index correlated with other indexes like well-being and happiness. What do you think they found?

The answer surprised many because the higher a nation’s stress index, the higher the well-being of the nation. A high stress index also correlated with high happiness and life-satisfaction scores. The more stressed out a nation was, the happier and more satisfied the people were with their lives. Why should that be?

Again it’s the Stress Paradox, high levels of stress are associated with both distress and well-being. Turns out that happy lives are not stress free and stress free lives are not necessarily happy. But this does make some sense because we only feel stress when we care about something. So the best way to interpret this result is by looking at the relationship between stress and meaning.

Stress and Meaning

Turns out that people with very meaningful lives have more stress. Stress seems to be the inevitable cost of engaging in goals that give us purpose. Rather than being a sign something is wrong in our lives, stress may be a signal indicating how engaged we are in things that are meaningful to us.

The time after my wife and I brought our twin sons home from the hospital is unquestionably the most stressful time of our lives. Babies require constant care and twins born four weeks early require even more. Yet, despite the constant activity and sleep deprivation, my wife and I look back on that time with fond memories. Why? Because it was the most meaningful time of our lives. It wasn’t the happiest time of our lives, but it was the most important thing we ever did.

Stress isn’t bad for us when it is meaningful. The assumption is that we would be happier if we were less busy, but this is not true. In fact, lacking meaningful stress won’t just make you less happy, it’s bad for your health. One study showed that middle-aged men who reported a high level of boredom were more than twice as likely to die of a heart attack over the next twenty years.

Stress becomes dangerous when it is meaningless. A large study had men report on two types of stress over a fifty-year period. The study differentiated between stress from major life events (like divorce, or being seriously injured) and the stress of daily hassles. Of the two types of stress, daily hassles were a better predictor of mortality, with three times as many deaths in the group that reported the most hassles. So what are these deadly hassles?

Deadly Stress is Meaningless

Like beauty, what is considered a hassle is in the eye of the beholder. What some men reported as uplifting events (time with spouse, cooking, work) others reported as a hassle. It was not the events themselves, but the men’s attitudes toward those events that made the difference. It wasn’t stress that was killing these men, but their failure to find meaning in the everyday stresses of their lives.

So the way to make friends with your stress is to find meaning in the challenges you face, big and small. How do you do that?

How to Make Stress Your Friend

One famous study asked Stanford students to keep a journal over winter break. They were divided into two groups. The first group was asked to write about their values and how their daily activities related to those values. The second was asked to write about good things happier and more confident about their ability to handle stress.

Analysis of the students’ journals found that writing about values helped students find meaning in the events of their day. This allowed students to transform daily hassles into expressions of what was important to them. Journaling about their values allowed students to transform hassles into meaningful events.

Writing about your values is one of the most effective psychological hacks ever studied. Values journaling can make people feel more powerful, in control, proud and strong. People who journal also feel more loving, empathic, and connected to others. It can even increase self-control improving success with weight loss, quitting smoking, and curbing alcohol consumption.

Best of all, it does not take a big commitment. People who wrote about their values for as little as ten minutes showed benefits months and even a year later. That is because writing about values transforms how we think about stress. It gives us a new and better mindset to face challenges and deal with hassles.

Values Journaling

The best part of values journaling is that it does not need to be difficult or time-consuming. As little as ten minutes can have a lasting impact.

All you need to do is pick a value that is important to you and then sit down and write about it (if you are having a hard time thinking of one, take a look at this list from Brené Brown). Then sit and write bout your chosen value for ten minutes. This is not an essay you need to show anyone, so just write what comes to mind without worrying about making it read well or look good. One good way to get the ink flowing is to set a timer for ten minutes and then just write whatever comes to mind until the timer goes off.

If you are not feeling it, then it may because you have picked a value that does not resonate with you. This can happen when you pick a value that you feel you should respect or one others have labeled you with. To be most effective, the value must be something that deeply resonates with you. So if you aren’t feeling it, try writing about a different value. The point of this exercise is not to inculcate yourself with an outside value, but to get in touch with your natural values.

Try it today.

Conclusion

We have all been led to believe that stress is not healthy. Yet trying to avoid stress, becomes its own source of stress. Instead of trying to avoid stress, it is time to recognize that the challenge-response can energize you and make you more effective. The challenge-response is something you want to embrace. What you want to avoid is the stress that feels meaningless — that is the stress which is toxic. The best way to do that is to connect your values to your stress so that you can find meaning in your experience. And the best way to do that is by setting aside just ten minutes to write about your values. The time required is little, but the benefits can be long-lasting.

“When you embrace stress, you can transform fear into courage, isolation into connection, and suffering into meaning.” — Kelly McGonigal