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Embrace Your Stress
Think of it as a pathway to happiness, rather than an obstacle
We live in boom times for stress-relief products. With the consumer crazes for adult coloring books, weighted blankets, and fidget spinners, there’s little question that some of the most popular products and buyable experiences of the last few years have been ones marketed at zapping our stress. Last year Estée Lauder jumped on the CBD bandwagon, becoming the first legacy beauty brand to sell products infused with the cannabidiol, which is believed to alleviate stress.
And humans’ effort to quash their stress is nothing new: According to lore, Han Dynasty soldiers in China crushed walnuts with their hands in order to help lower their level of stress during battle. Our consumption patterns tell the story of a species desperate for something to calm our minds.
But what if this desire to banish stress is at least partly misguided? If stress is inescapable, might we be better off abandoning our attempts to eliminate it, and instead learning to embrace it as a fundamental part of life?
While researchers have linked chronic stress to increased risk of heart disease, sleep issues, depression, and a host of other ailments, other research has uncovered a more surprising finding: Poor health outcomes might be more a result of how we view our stress than how much of it we have.
In 2011, a study out of the University of Wisconsin found that people who believe that stress is bad for their health die earlier than equally stressed-out people who don’t view their stress as fundamentally damaging. The famous Whitehall study, which followed roughly 10,000 English civil servants in the late 1960s and followed up with them in the late 1980s, reached a similar conclusion.
“Higher levels of stress seem to go along with things we want: love, health, and satisfaction with our lives.”
In her 2011 book The Upside of Stress, psychologist and Stanford lecturer Kelly McGonigal — whose research was inspired in part by that 2011 study — argued that stress can and often does coexist with psychological well-being. She points to research from the Gallup World Poll, which found that the countries…
