I just revisited a great TED talk by Kelly McGonigal on How to Make Stress Your Friend.
She quotes a completely bonkers study of 30,000 adults in the US, followed over eight years. Participants were asked two questions:
How much stress have you experienced over the last year?
Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?
The researchers then used public death records to see who died.
Not surprisingly, people who experienced a lot of stress and believed stress was harmful had a 43% greater chance of dying over the next 12 months.
But the absolutely crazy thing is this: people who didn’t believe stress was harmful were no more likely to die — regardless of how much stress they experienced.
Apparently, it’s not stress that’s dangerous. It’s believing that stress is harmful for your health that could kill you.
The authors of the study estimated that over the eight years of the study, 182,000 Americans died prematurely from believing that stress is bad for you.
That makes that belief the 15th largest cause of death in the US … more dangerous than HIV/AIDS or homicide.
Our beliefs are powerful. They can literally kill us.
Perhaps it’s worth spending a bit more time examining our beliefs.
And discarding the ones that aren’t serving us.
