HOW TO MAKE STRESS YOUR FRIEND

By Kelly McGonigal Hello! Welcome back to my blog. Today I would like to summarize a Ted video by Kelly McGonigal. She talks about how to make stress your friend for 14.28 minutes. A fun topic because it is about how to make stress as our friend. Means, you do not have view stress as an enemy. Perhaps you and I have ever felt stress in our life and we do not know what and how stress really is. By reading this summary, we will know and learn about stress which explain by Kelly as a health psychologist. She has mission that is want to help people to be happier and healthier. Okay. Let move to the next paragraph. When open her speech, she asked the audience to make a confession about the level of stress. She told about what she has been teaching for 10 years is doing more harm than good because she have turned stress into the enemy. So, she has been telling the people that stress make us sick. Otherwise, she wants change our mind about stress. Are you ready for that? Keep reading! She start with a study that made her rethink her whole approach to stress. That study tracked 30.000 adults in the United States for eighty years. They started by asking people question and then used public death records to find who died. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. That is over 20,000 deaths a year. So, when you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Then, she explained how it works. She asked the audience to pretend that they are the participants of a social stress test. They are asked to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. By doing this test, normally we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure but it a sign that our body was energized. 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. When stress, our heart rate goes up and blood vessels constrict as the picture she has shown. It is one of the reasons that chronic is stress is sometimes associated with the cardiovascular disease. Then, in the study participants who viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed as the picture she has shown and this condition actually looks like when we feel joy and courage. So, by knowing this fact, we are going to remember that when we stress, it is our body reaction to help us rise a challenge. In the 7.29 minutes, she talks about one more intervention that stress make you social. It understands by explaining the oxytocin hormone. Oxytocin is a neuro hormone which fine tunes our brain’s social instincts and primes us to do things that strengthen close relationships. In spite of oxytocin is useful for us, it is a stress hormone. It is as much a part of your stress responses as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. When it is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Then , she explain about how stress is going to make us healthier. The explanation is oxytocin does not only act on your brain but also on your body. One of its main roles in your body is to protect our cardiovascular system from the effect of stress and naturally anti inflammatory. It also helps our blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. In brief, the harmful effects of stress on our health are not inevitable. How we think and how we act can transform your experience of stress.