The way we think about something has the power to transform us. In The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal says the body responds to stress in more ways than just fight-or-flight.
We perform much better in stressful situations when we enter what is called a challenge response. Instead of panic or recklessness, our brains maximize focus so that we perform at our best:
[...] the brain and the body actually has another way of responding to these kind of high-stakes challenges, you know, whether it’s an important negotiation or you have to give a speech or an athletic competition. Those moments where you really want to show up and do your best. And that other way of responding to stress is called a challenge response. That it’s a way for your brain and body to give you maximum focus, attention, and energy. And it’s physically different than the sort of the fight-or-flight response that we have when we feel- deeply threatened by a stressful situation. When you have a threat response, you know, your body and brain are shifting into the state that is really sort of the classic association with the harmful stress response.
Researchers have become interested in understanding the challenge response:
When you have a challenge response, the brain and body actually sift into a state that gives you more access to your resources. You know your heart might still be pounding, but your blood vessels are going to relax and open up so you get more blood flow to your muscles and to your brain. Your brain shifts into a state — it’s actually better at paying attention to everything in your environment rather than sort of being laser-focused like you might be in a fight-or-flight response on what’s going wrong or what’s dangerous. When you have a challenge response, all of your senses open to all the information that’s available to you, which means that you’re basically smarter under stress.
When we acknowledge our own stress and accept how we feel, we have the ability to shift from viewing stress as a threat to leveraging it as a prompt to refocus on our resourcefulness and meet the challenges that produced it head on:
[...] that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.
Watch the full talk below.