With our modern lifestyle, stress is unavoidable. But can changing how you feel about stress and viewing it as less harmful, make you healthier? Stress has got always a bad reputation and unfairly so! It is not stress per se that is bad for your health. But, how you view and react to stress that marks that vital distinction between the healthy and unhealthy zones!
While stress cannot be avoided or reduced, it can definitely be managed. The pounding of the heart, and the butterflies in our stomach before an anxious moment is simply our bodies’ realization that we are about to do something significant, of important consequence and if we acknowledge and ‘take in’ that feeling, we understand and manage the stressful situation a whole lot better. One of the most simple and effective ways to manage stress is to befriend and embrace it wholeheartedly and not demonize it.
In this highly informative video, Kelly McGonigal, a practicing health psychologist and author of the book ‘The Upside Of Stress’, she breaks all unfounded myths surrounding stress. McGonigal expertly swivels us around the science behind stress, citing medical facts, happenings, and statistical figures to drive home her point. She makes an intriguing revelation that our bodies’ stress response has a built-in mechanism, for stress resilience and that mechanism is human connection.
The simple truth is that if we all happily courted and dated stress in our daily lives, it will not only make us more courageous, resilient, confident and prepared to face life’s challenges thrown randomly our way, but also make us reach out and seek for value and meaning in our relationships, thus making us more trusting, loving, and empathetic.
Simply concluded, viewing stress positively leads to better health and a longer life-span.
(This post was originally published at Women’s Web – http://www.womensweb.in/2016/07/kelly-mcgonigal-the-upside-of-stress/)
