Kelly McGonigal is a convert. A health psychologist who teaches at Stanford University, for years she had held to the conventional view that stress is bad for you.
But when a few years ago she came across research which suggested that stress is bad for you only when you believe it to be damaging, she had to reconsider. Indeed, the same research found that people who lived with stress but did not view it as harmful were the healthiest people of all.
She suggests a three-step approach to change our “mindset”: acknowledge stress when you experience it, welcome the stress by recognising that it’s a response to something you care about, then make use of the energy it gives you.
