What If Stress Isn’t the Enemy?
Most of us have been taught that stress is bad for us.
Not just uncomfortable — actually harmful. That chronic stress damages the heart, weakens the immune system, shortens lives. That the goal, if we care about our health and wellbeing, is to reduce stress as much as possible.
Health psychologist Kelly McGonigal believed this for years. She taught it to her students. She helped people manage and minimise their stress. And then she encountered a study that made her rethink everything.
The study that changed her mind
The study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States over eight years. Participants were asked two questions: how much stress have you experienced in the past year, and do you believe stress is harmful to your health?
Researchers then checked public records to find out who had died.
The results were striking. People who had experienced high levels of stress in the past year had a 43% increased risk of dying — but only if they believed that stress was harmful. People who experienced high levels of stress but did not believe stress was harmful had no increased risk of dying. In fact they had among the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study — including people who reported relatively little stress.
The conclusion McGonigal drew: it isn’t stress itself that’s killing people. It’s the belief that stress is harmful.
How you think about stress changes what it does to your body
This finding opened up a different line of research — into what happens physiologically when people relate to stress differently.
In a typical stress response, the heart beats faster, breathing quickens, and the body prepares for action. This response is usually interpreted as anxiety — as the body doing something wrong that needs to be managed or suppressed.
But when people were taught to think of the stress response as their body helping them rise to a challenge — preparing them, energising them, getting them ready — something interesting happened. Their heart still beat faster. But the blood vessels stayed relaxed rather than constricting. This pattern is more similar to what happens during joy or courage than to what happens in fear.
The physical experience of stress changed based on the meaning given to it.
The other surprising finding: connection
McGonigal also explored another aspect of stress that tends to get overlooked: the way it drives people toward each other.
Stress activates not only the fight/flight/freeze response but also what some researchers call the tend-and-befriend response. Under stress, humans are wired to seek connection — to reach out, to help, to be close to people they care about. Oxytocin — sometimes called the bonding hormone — is released as part of the stress response, motivating social connection and making us more attuned to the people around us.
In other words, stress can be a mechanism for deepening relationships — if we let it, and if we reach toward others rather than isolating.
McGonigal’s research found that people who spent time caring for others during stressful periods showed no stress-related increase in mortality. The act of connection seemed to be protective.
What this means in practice
None of this means stress is harmless or that the pressure many people are under isn’t real and significant. Chronic overload, burnout, and exhaustion are genuine problems that deserve genuine attention.
What it suggests is that the story we tell about stress — what we believe it means and what it’s doing to us — matters more than we might think.
If every experience of stress is accompanied by the belief that your body is failing you, that something is going wrong, that you need to suppress or escape this feeling — that framing may be adding a layer of harm on top of the stress itself.
If instead stress can be understood as your body mobilising to meet something that matters — as energy, as activation, as a sign that you’re engaged with something important — that shift in meaning may change what the stress actually does.
The question worth sitting with
McGonigal ends her talk with a reframe worth considering:
Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake.
Which means the presence of stress isn’t evidence that something is going wrong. It’s often evidence that something matters. That you’re invested. That the outcome is meaningful to you.
That doesn’t make stress easy. But it makes it something other than an enemy to be defeated.
What might change — in how you experience difficult periods, in how you treat yourself during them, in whether you reach toward people or pull away — if you stopped trying to get rid of stress and started trying to make sense of it?
Watch the talk
Kelly McGonigal’s TED Talk is one of the most watched health talks of the past decade. It’s 14 minutes and genuinely worth your time: How to Make Stress Your Friend — Kelly McGonigal
If anxiety or stress is something you’re actively working with — particularly if the experience of it has started to feel overwhelming or hard to make sense of — anxiety counselling can help. Not just to reduce it, but to understand what it’s about and what it might be telling you. Available in Squamish and online across BC. The free Name It to Tame It anxiety course is also available if you’d like a self-paced starting point.
