Can Stress Be Helpful?

difficult conversation with a friend. She says, we can reframe our stress as something that actually helps us. It's often your mindset about stress that can influence the extent to which it can have harmful or helpful effects. So when we have more of a stress's enhancing mindset that leads to better outcomes. On today's show, What Science teaches Us about the Upside of Stress, I'm maya shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of

a big change. It's easy for us to see stress as the enemy. In a stressful situation, our heart races, our blood pressure rises, our breathing quickens, and this can all feel pretty uncomfortable. If we could wave a magic wand that would eliminate all future stress from our lives, many of us would wave that wand to do. Pay believes that if we can make a small shift in our mindset, stress can actually be a powerful asset. So can you start off by sharing what it is that

got you interested in studying stress in the first place. Basically, I grew up as a child of immigrants, and anyone who is a child of immigrants knows that there is just stress involved in that experience. The stress of moving to a new country, the stress of having kids, raising kids in a new environment, the stress of being far away from your family if you've come from a developing country, being able to support your family while also trying to

help your kids learn a new language. Here, all of that, and so I realized later on in life that I had absorbed a lot of that stress. Heck, to this day, I still watch my parents stress and have to say to myself, wait a minute, pause, do all the things that I advise other people to do. So that is a piece of why I study stress. But also one of the things I love about my parents was that they were very education focused and so the stress of doing well in school, not even just the pressure that

they put on us. They didn't put much pressure on us. They just sent us to one of the best private schools possible and said, you know, you do you. But in that process that meant that I experienced the stress of being one of few black people in every classroom I was in. So then there's a stress of adjusting and adapting to environments where you are the only where you're different. So all of those things combined led to

me eventually studying stress. Yeah, there's this charming story in the Dufe about your high school yearbook and the fact that clearly you weren't the only one thinking that you were stressed out. Can you tell us a bit about that. Yes, So, you know, in high school usually you have a yearbook, and in our yearbook there are roasts. In those roasts, it highlights who you think you are and who you actually are. And my dream was that I was best dressed, is what they said. But my reality was that I

was the most stressed. So even senior year, you know, even senior year, they saw that in me, and I saw it in myself. But the thing about it is there were so many ways in which that stress helped me. It challenged me, and it pushed me. So I kind of always felt like stress isn't always this terrible thing that we need to run away from and avoid and deny. Maybe it is helping us in some ways too. So let's start with the basics. If you can give us kind of the stress one oh one, how do you

define stress? I feel like the simplest definition is when the demands of a situation exceed your resources to cope. But you have to then take it a step further and say, well, what are demands? And often demands are there's some type of danger in the situation, there's some type of uncertainty. You need to exert a bit of extra effort in this situation. Then when you think about resources, well, what helps us overcome danger, uncertainty, extra effort we need

to put into something. Well, when we have the knowledge and the abilities to tackle that thing, when our personalities, our dispositions can be helpful in tackling that thing, and also when we have externals aboard other people cheering us on, other people teaching us, that's when we have more resources. Yeah, what's interesting about this definition is that when it comes to stress, it's really about our subjective assessment that we have the resources to cope. So it might not be

the objective resources. In fact, I might have the mental and physical resources to cope with the situation, but if my self perception is that I don't have those resources now, all of a sudden, it is a stressful situation. Yeah, so I would almost reframe the definition as feeling like the demands of the situation exceed your resources to cope. Is that right? Yeah? A lot of it is our subjective assessment of it, which is a piece of why I tell people don't say like, don't be stressed, that

shouldn't stress you out, because it doesn't matter. Subjectively, I am feeling stressed. So that's what needs to be taken into consideration, my subjective experience of it. On a physiological level, can you tell us what happens to us when we experience stress? So when we experience stress, our sympathetic nervous system gets activated. It's that part of our body that tells us do you need to fight or do you

need to flee this situation? And when that happens, we get adrenaline, we get dopamine, we get cortisol, all of the resources we need physiologically to move to act, to do what we need to do. This process is a very adaptive one, so that when you're done with the stressor ideally your body wants to go back to its resting state, where those hormones decrease, that adrenaline decreased, you get back to resting and relaxing and all that. That

is a normal physiological response to an acute stressor. Yeah, I love you're sharing that, because stress obviously gets a really bad rep but it's not just this random bad thing that our body's experience. It exists in part because it is highly adaptive and there are many situations in which an active stress response helps us do what needs to be done. Right, So, in other words, you mentioned cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline, How do those translate into increased performance increased acuity? Just

help me build that bridge. So essentially, your body is being taxed and your heart rate is increasing because again you're getting ready. That cortisol is giving you the energy that you need to be attentive, to be focused to approach the situation, and when you have increased cortisol, you are attentive to threats often in a good way. You're like waiting for what's happening. You're able to remember things in a different way, and so we need to remember

when our bodies are acting. It's telling us you've got this, now, let's use this. But one of the problems is when we can be overactivated and too attentive to threat and those levels of the dopamine. The court is all the adrenaline, all that are staying elevated kind of chronically, and that is what leads to disease and all of these problems that we want to avoid physiologically. So that's kind of the stress cycle. Okay, so now you've given us the

lay of the land on the basics of stress. Yes, one fascinating thing your research focuses on is that how we think about our own stress, our mindset, and our attitude towards stress can actually change its impact on us. Yes, can you first walk us through the two types of mindsets that we can have towards stress. So the two types of mindsets are a mindset that stress is enhancing. It can help us in terms of our perform ours, our growth, our learning. The second piece is that stress

is debilitating. It harms us in terms of our health and vitality and our performance and our growth and our learning. And it's often your mindset about stress that can influence the extent to which it can have harmful or helpful effects. So when we have more of a stress is enhancing mindset that leads to better outcomes. I love this research. I'm wondering if you can give me a couple of examples of how introducing this mindset shift was actually able

to help performance in different contexts. So in one study, we had people just watch a video showing the many ways in which stress can be enhancing. You can imagine things like that stressful moment in a soccer game and somebody makes the goal. We can each think of times when we have risen to the occasion. When we show people these videos and then have them engage in a creative task, we find the they're more creative. We find that they are more attentive to positive things in the

environment versus negative things in the environment. On the flip side, tell people or show them videos of when stress can be debilitating and see the opposite, they're less creative and also generally more negative mood, more attentive to threats. So that's some of the research we've done. Yeah, and I know that you work at a business school and you often think about psychology as it applies to organizational behavior,

and you did some similar research when it comes to negotiators. Yes, so often people are very stressed in the context of negotiation. So in this research, we basically just told people that, you know, a little bit of stress before negotiations is actually okay. So we had half the people we told that, the other half we didn't tell anything prior to negotiation, and we found that for women who experienced cortisol increases

in the negotiations, So physiologically they were stressed. However, they were told a little bit of stress is okay in the negotiation, they outperform those who were told nothing about stress being helpful for negotiations. So there's something about knowing that this is actually an okay thing, that when your body is having this response, that can lead to beneficial outcomes. Yeah. And one of the most fascinating insights is that our underlying physiology can change when we adopt a stress as

enhancing mindset. So it's not just that I think more positive thoughts, it actually can affect our physiological response to stress at this underlying level. I think that that's absolutely right that when you have an enhancing mindset, it can affect your body's response to stress. There has been research showing that the walls of your blood vessels, rather than constricting, they're more likely to dilate with a stress's enhancing mindset. And the importance of the mind body cannet is something

I think we often forget. And you know, our dominant model and narrative is that we should deny, reduce, and avoid stress, and that is not always the case. Every single person I know can tell of the time where their stress helps them. So instead, and this research we talk a lot about how can you acknowledge your stress, welcome your stress, and use it in a way that will be beneficial because it is designed to help you. Now it's important to say, I'm not saying run towards stress,

like you shouldn't like find more stressors. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying it's not always a bad thing. It's actually designed to help you. Yeah, you talk about dating your stress. Yes, you know, slight change listeners were simply asking for a first date. Okay, you can decide if you want to do a second or a third, but just go on that first date. That's right. Get to know your stress a little better and be kind to it. Open the door for it, you know, let

it in, welcome it, see how it feels. That's what we need to do a lot more of. After the break, we hear more from a Dube about the benefits of this mindset shift, and we talk about its limits. She shares her go to strategies for managing stress. When a simple reframe isn't enough, We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Are there situations where

applying a stress as enhancing mindset doesn't make sense? Because I can see a situation where if we apply this mindset too liberally, we might end up tolerating certain stressful situations that we really should try and avoid. So, for example, a highly toxic relationship at work or in your personal life, that's a situation where you're kind of you really think, Okay, we need to change the situation. I need to get out of this situation, versus using a mindset shift in

order to better adapt to it. So do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, I do think that our minds are so complicated and we will trick ourselves into believing a stressful situation is a good one when it's not. So that's when the idea. Remember I talked about demands resources. One resource is external support, your friends helping you and

seeing when something is harmful versus helpful for you. Yeah, I think it's helpful to clarify that this is a mindset that's almost best to adopt when you're in situations where you can't avoid the stress. You can't control whether that situation exists or not, right, and so adopting a more positive mindset might be one of the few resources at hand. That's absolutely right. And the challenge with the dominant narrative about reducing or avoiding stress is that there

are times where we cannot do that. You can't, it's not possible. So that's why it's important to understand how the stress it's you're experiencing or how your body's response can be helpful. Absolutely. I mean, so many people listening right now are thinking I don't have any control right now over the stressful situation. So the dupe thank you

for giving us some other techniques. Yeah, Okay, let's say we've consulted with our resources, so our friends and our family and the people that we trust in our lives, and we've consulted with ourselves of course, and we've identified a situation in which having a stress as enhancing mindset is going to serve us well, how do we learn to cultivate this mindset? So a piece of this goes back to that, how do I think of my stress differently? When my heart is beating, I'm normally thinking to myself,

this is bad. But if you can remind yourself that my heartbeating is telling me, like I'm excited about something, there's something here that I care about. This is something that I want to do well, and this is something that I can do well. And then that reframes that heartbeat not as a bad thing, but as your body

preparing to act. There have been so many times in my life, whether when I was a child playing the violin, or whether it's going into an interviews for a slight change of plans, I get a little spooked if I'm not nervous, because that means maybe I don't care as much as I used to. And so I've actually I see stress as being a very affirming signal because it shows me that I really care about the outcome, and it justifies the unpleasantness of some of those feelings. And

that's a beautiful way of approaching it. That we are typically stressed because there's an underlying reason why we care about the situation. And if we can continue to ask ourselves why why, then that puts a whole different lens around why you're stressed and changes your approach. Can you give me an example in the dubae from your own life in which you started asking yourself the series of why questions and it led you to a place where you're better able to embrace your stress or at least

realize okay, good, at least it's serving some purpose. Yes, I'm a professor, so each semester I teach one hundred and forty plus students and the day before class would always feel very stressed. And here's the thing, it's not that I would also be stressed. I'd also be a jerk, you know, I'd be obnoxious to my loved ones, like just not a person that anyone wanted to be around.

And in fact, I'd be happier when my significant outhers were traveling or whatever, because it's like I just wanted to be focused, and I had to ask say to myself, first of all, that's not sustainable over time. I'm a good teacher. Students like me, I've done this for years. So I had to say, Okay, well why do you have this reaction? Why are you stressed? And often it was like, I'm stressed because I don't want to do badly in the classroom. Why because I feel like what

I have to share with students is really important. Why because I'm training future business leaders to be the most phenomenal leaders possible. Why Well, if I do that, well, then our organizations will be healthier and people will be

happier in their workplaces. Well why does that matter? Because if people are happier and healthier in their workplaces, then we're going to be able to address some of the critical challenges in this world, the questions that need to be addressed, solve lots of the problems that need to

be solved. And so when you get to that, then it's like, well, ay, it tells you that's a good reason to be stressed, but be it also says, you know, all right, we'll go get it go do it, And that's a piece of just kind of like acknowledging that type of stress and welcoming it, because then you're like, oh, I'm pumped up. What am I doing? I'm changing the world. I'm feeling right now just hearing you just that process,

just that process makes a big difference. I really love that, Medupe, because as you were sharing this, I related to that early stress and I was thinking to myself that, damn well deserves stress. That situation definitely desert stress because Medupe is changing the world, and so it certainly seems like that lecture carries significance and importance because look at all these extremely positive downstream consequences, right And the more I do that, then it tells me, like, I don't have

to be a jerk. Yeah, share more about that, because obviously stress does not just have internal consequences. It can have a lot of external consequences on our loved ones and the people we care about. So I'd love to dig into that a bit more. I'm sure that's something a lot of people can resonate with. Yes, one of the first things I tell people to do is to acknowledge your typical reactions to stress. What are their emotions,

what are their behaviors, and what's their physiology? And the behaviors one is really important because a it serves as a signal when you are going for the potato chips, the wine and yelling at your partner, that probably means you're stressed. So now do an inventory about what you need to do about it. And the reason why it's really important for me to always kind of go back and ask myself why something matters? Is it Ultimately none of us wants to do those destructive behaviors to ourselves

and to others. And so when you keep asking yourself why and you understand the bigger picture, one of the things it does, it's like I need that source of support to hel we change the world. So I think it increases your ability to relate to others in a way that can maybe help you in what you're trying to achieve, versus them being a distraction that's preventing you

from doing what you need to achieve effectively. Yeah, this is so interesting because you know you initially defined stress as the demands of the situation exceed your resources to cope. And I think what I'm hearing from you is we often have more resources than we think, we're just really hesitant to ask for them, to admit that we actually

need that kind of support in those resources. And so when we think through this lens, which is my stress has a purpose because I really care about these end outcomes, it can lead us to feel less sheepish about asking a friend for help, asking a loved one if they're willing to give us a hand. It's hard for all of us to ask people for help. It's one of

the hardest things. And what's interesting is when we don't ask somebody for help, it's often because there is something that we're uncertain about, or feel threatened about or worried about. One of the ways I interpret what you're saying, is it when you kind of reframe your stress, the people that seem like demands actually become resources. Yes, you can

view them more as resources versus as demands. You go from thinking of it as the person who's taking away from my ability to prepare for class to the person who is helping me and can help me in what I need to do to make this difference in the lives of others. Oh, that's so nice. You know you've taught us how changing our attitudes towards stress can lead to better outcomes, and also how it is that we

can cultivate this kind of mindset. But of course, there are lots of situations where we overshoot and a shift in mindset might not be enough to tamp down that response. So what other techniques would you recommend to help us to just lower our stress response overall in these kinds of situations. What are the types of things that you do do pay to manage your stress? So I am I'm a big meditator, darn. I was hoping you wouldn't say meditation. I know, I know, and I couldn't at

one point too, you know. And I remember, like when I was first trying to meditate, I just fall asleep each time, like give me five minutes. I am out immediately. But I realized that I really need to slow my mind down. You know, there's so much firing that for me when I sit and I'm just present first thing in the morning, that allows me to just have a different response to the many things that will come my

way during the day. And I say that, and I don't like sounding woo woo like I don't like sounding like that person meditation is science based, so there's nothing woo about it. I have learned in my life that it's something that I need because it slows me down and it's been so helpful. Taking out some time to just kind of be present with yourself helps you to think clearly and act deliberately instead of being reactive. So one of the types of meditations I engage in focuses

on body scanning. So you start with your head and you scan and you just notice each of your bodily sensations. Because the idea behind this is that any reaction we typically have is preceded by a physical sensation, and so if we can detect and be good at understanding or feeling our sensations, then that's preempting are reacting immediately. And so I body scan regularly and I find it to be incredibly helpful. The other thing, honestly, it's just taking

a moment to breathe. That minute that I find myself like I'm overwhelmed and I have this and that to do when the this isn't working whatever, stop breathe, breathe, just breathe, and it just slows things down in a unique way that then lets you say Okay, how am I feeling right now? Let me take an inventory. That's what I often do. I need to pause and take an inventory instead of just trying to push through. Stop and pause. As you look into the future of stress research,

what excites you most? So? What nut are you? Are you most hoping that researcher's crack. I really want people to be better at understanding when they're stressed, because you are the only person that's with you twenty four seven. And so what I'm most excited about are some of the technologies that will allow people to notice when they're stressed. Is there a buzzing thing on your finger that tells you that your blood pressure is super high right now?

Pay attention. Is there some type of device that is telling you, here's what your cardiovascular reactivity is looking like. Right now, there's a spike right here. Breathe a little bit. And so, as technology develops and can even kind of help us in noticing some of these things and can just kind of like I think it is like that blinking light that says, hey, pay attention, then I think that will help us in being able to give ourselves what we need, and that ultimately means it will be

healthier and happier. So that's interesting because I feel like I'm sort of excited about technology, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because on the one hand, I think that kind of self awareness and understanding is so critical. On the other hand, we're trying to measure so much, and all these measurements are also just proxies of stress. Right. Too much vigilance around our physiological states and or our mental states can breed almost a new

kind of anxiety, like a meta layer of anxiety. Do you feel in any way that there's limits to how much we should be in tune with our body and minds, because at a certain point it can be so excessive, right where you just forget, like, you know what, I just need to kind of exist too, And I don't need my little phone or my watch or my ring buzzing at me telling me that I'm stressed in any given moment because I'm just you know, I'm hanging out with my friends and I don't know, maybe I don't

want the biofeedback. Yes. The thing about stress research, and I guess much research, is that you have to know yourself and know what works for you and what doesn't. Yeah, if you're the type of person where the constant monitoring will be more stressful, then you shouldn't constantly monitor. But if you're the type of person where the monitoring makes you say, ooh, I only got two hours of sleep last night, but I need to get more and I know them and that helps you and helps change your behavior,

then do it. So for me, I am one of those people like I'm hard enough on myself, so I don't need a buzzing thing. I need to be more gentle. But how I use this technology is to say, like, I'm kind of feeling tired. How much rest did I get? Oh? Wow, I've been in the danger zone for five days. Let me do something that will remind me to get in bed earlier. So if you can use it lovingly and gently in a way that will help you behave in a healthy way for you, that's what I'm talking about.

I also wouldn't want us to overuse our technology and rely on it to tell us the things that we need to rely on our minds and bodies to tell us. I just think of it as another metric to use to paint a holistic picture of what's going on with you, and because it's so hard to be in tune with what our bodies you're doing, because we've ignored our bodies for so long, these technologies give us greater insight that we wouldn't ordinarily have. Yeah, I love that. I think

that's exactly right. So even doing this work for a while, And I wonder, in your years of doing stress research, whether there's any example that's particularly salient for you where someone reached out to you and said, madupay, you changed the game for me, like you really really helped me manage the stressful situation or change my mindset. Are there any personal testimonials that you can share with us so we can see the impact of your research in the wild.

You know, the biggest example I have is a couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend and she was super super stressed and I literally just asked her, what do you need? And she said, I need somebody to accompany me to walk through of her home because she was closing on it the next day. And you know that's stressful, Like you're worried, like am I getting ripped off? Is the microwave? Going to work? Is that?

And just having somebody else with you to help out with that is huge, and sometimes you'd think you have to do it by yourself and then no one's going to have time for you, yea. Or everyone has busy schedules, which they do, but can you at least ask first and let someone say no. But more often than not, people will make it work because if you've cultivated those relationships, they'll move things around their schedule to be there for you. And that sticks with me because it's something that I

also need to remind myself to do. Ask myself, what do I need right now? What do I need? It's simple. So many of the answers to our stress are within us, and we just need to ask. We just need to ask. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Next week's episode, we hear from comedian Hussan Minhaj. In our conversation, Huson gets candid about the downsides of his sudden rise in popularity and how it's fed an unhealthy obsession with being liked. He

tells me he's now reconsidering his future in comedy. Being an artist is who I am. I do have this need to express myself, but I have to find new mediums as my life continues. That are less and less and less attached to whether people like me or not. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive

produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram

at doctor Maya Shucker. Everything in moderation, That's what this is about, except for Girl Scout cookies, but exactment. There's no moderation there. Yes,