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Many of us have felt more than a little stressed over the past couple of years. For me, exhibit A is my teeth. A recent trip to the dentist confirmed that months of pandemic-induced jaw-clenching, product of the usual deadline stress amplified by the demands of two young children, had left four of them broken.

Crumbling teeth are small fry. Last year, the American Psychological Association , and predicted “a mental health crisis that could yield serious health and social consequences for years to come”. Increased risk of diabetes, depression and cardiovascular disease and more are all associated with high stress levels. It’s enough to make you feel stressed just thinking about it.

Perhaps we just need to think about stress differently, though. That, at least, is the startling conclusion of researchers studying the mind-body connection. There are natural benefits to being stressed, they say, and if we change our “stress mindset”, we might be able to turn things around and make stress a positive influence on our lives. Fortunately, there are some simple hacks that will allow us to do this, and they bring with them the promise of better physical health, clearer thinking, increased mental toughness and greater productivity.

There is no denying that too much stress can harm both body and mind. It has been linked to all six of the main causes of death in the West: cancer, heart disease, liver disease, accidents, lung disease and suicide. It can weaken the immune system, leaving us more prone to infection and reducing the effectiveness of vaccines, and can mess with our guts, triggering disease-inducing inflammation. It can hamper cognitive performance, reduce productivity and increase the risk of mental-health problems including depression, while compelling us to make unhealthy life choices such as smoking and eating foods we know we shouldn’t. Small wonder that the World Health Organization has .

The stress mindset

Stress didn’t always have such a bad rep. When Hungarian endocrinologist and pioneering stress researcher Hans Selye brought the word into the medical lexicon, he defined it simply as . And the immediate physiological effects of stress – increased heart rate, sweaty palms, a sudden surge of energy and even tummy trouble – exist for a reason. “The body’s stress response is designed to help us thrive and survive when we’re faced with threats or challenges to our existence and to our goals,” says .

It all starts in the amygdala, the brain’s fear centre, which is primed to detect threats. If the amygdala deems something to be of concern, it flags it up via the hypothalamus, which triggers the “fight or flight” response. Adrenaline courses through the body and blood flow increases, boosting alertness and priming us to run. Another hormone, cortisol, releases stored glucose to give us more energy, and dampens down processes like digestion. Body and mind are primed to either confront a threat or run away from it.

That might have been useful with a sabre-toothed cat, but seems less so when you are confronting a deadline. Yet it has long been known that acute stress responses can also help get us through challenging or threatening everyday situations. They can make us more alert and more focused. Although we find it harder to retrieve specific memories when stressed, stress hormones . They also tell the body to prepare for potential damage, building new cells and ramping up our immune system. On a purely psychological level, even longer-lasting stress associated with life events such as the loss of a loved one or a divorce – or a pandemic – can bring long-term positives, says Crum. “They lead to profound changes in people’s experience of the world, their appreciation for life, their resilience and toughness, and their sense of connection to others and to their values.”

The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of stress lies at the heart of the new school of thought about how best to deal with it. “For many years, the spotlight has been on negative aspects of stress, including detrimental health effects, loss of productivity and depression,” says Petar Jerčić, a researcher at Jamzone, a tech company in the Netherlands. That means most of us are unaware that a positive side of stress even exists, and we develop what .

Mindsets are core beliefs about the nature of something, and although they aren’t necessarily right or wrong, they tend to be oversimplifications, says Crum. There is plenty of research showing that our mindset can have a profound effect on many aspects of our lives. People who view ageing negatively, for example, tend to adopt fewer healthy behaviours, are less likely to visit the doctor, and age worse and die sooner. Students who view intelligence as something malleable that can be worked on, rather than being fixed and genetically determined, feel more motivated, get better test scores and enjoy learning more. Back in 2007, Crum showed that hotel workers who considered their job to give them a decent workout .

Crum’s interest in our stress mindset came after a late night as a doctoral student at Yale University, under a mountain of stress over what to make the topic of her thesis. “It occurred to me that the true nature of stress is complex, and we’re forming mindsets about it that are overly simplified,” she says. “Even if those mindsets have some connection to the truth, they might be having a negative effect.”

To test that, she assigned volunteers who worked in an office into one of two groups. One group watched short videos that told them how stress is bad, causing workplace mistakes and illness. The other group learned that stress improves workplace performance, immunity and well-being. Sure enough, those who came to believe that stress is beneficial .

When that research was published in 2013, others were already coming to similar conclusions. One 2011 , showing that when people under a lot of stress believed it was good for them, they fared better than people with less stress who believed it was bad for them. Worst of all was having a lot of stress and believing that is bad: people in this group had a 43 per cent increased risk of premature death in the study period. , and showed that those who believed their stress was bad for them had a higher risk of heart disease than those who didn’t, regardless of how much stress they reported.

Crum believes there are four basic ways our mindset can affect our stress response. The first is shifting our attention: rather than noticing all the unpleasant effects of stress, a positive mindset allows us to focus on possible opportunities instead. Second, while not necessarily reducing negative emotions – you are going to still feel sad, angry or upset when dealing with a difficult situation – a positive mindset means these can be accompanied by positive emotions such as feelings of hope, connection or resilience. “The ‘stress is enhancing’ mindset is really powerful in that it reduces unnecessary stress – the stress about stress – and it also amps up positive emotions, which are really important for motivation and physiology,” says Crum.

The third effect is on behaviour. People who view stress as bad tend to behave in one of two ways: they either “freak out”, akin to the fight response, or “check out”, a bit like a flight response. Faced with the stress of this article deadline, for example, I might work myself up into a lather, feeling so hyped up and on edge that I am unable to focus on the job at hand, or I might wildly procrastinate in the hope that the source of my stress might go away. For some, this flight from reality can also take the form of substance abuse, says Crum.

Those who have a positive mindset, meanwhile, don’t dodge the unpleasantness of stress, but can use it to get stuff done. Crum’s doctoral research showed, for example, that such people are more open and receptive to negative feedback, and more willing to persist in times of struggle. In 2020, her team showed that this applied even to those training to become US Navy SEALs. Cadets with a positive stress mindset got further, completed obstacle courses faster and . , Australia, has found similar things to be true of two groups of people who tend to experience high levels of stress: university students and police officers. Those with a stress-positive mindset , and also experienced feelings of stress less adversely. “These tendencies in turn predict stress-related outcomes such as well-being and performance,” he says.

“There is no magic to thinking our way out of stress”

The last way that mindset affects the stress response is via hormones. In preliminary studies, Crum and her colleagues have found that people who view stress as enhancing, rather than debilitating, have better regulation of cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate, a hormone that helps with brain growth after stress.

Thinking our way out of stress might sound like wishful thinking, but there is no magic to it, says Crum. “Our minds, our brains are connected to every organ in our bodies,” she says. “They’re the hub that helps us communicate between the outside and the inside worlds, and so it really makes a whole lot of sense that how we’re organising and thinking about something can change how we feel and respond.”

Interest is now growing in how we might all harness our mindset to turn stress to our advantage. Jerčić and his colleagues at Jamzone have created , an interactive virtual reality game that trains people’s stress mindset using real-time feedback on changes to their heart rate and breathing – a good proxy for the action of stress hormones, which are much harder to measure in real time. The game has been trialled in various environments, including the workplace and clinical settings, with positive results, says Jerčić.

Reframing anxiety

Although it is interesting to measure the physiology, Crum thinks it is important to focus on behaviour, too – not least because the short-term activity of hormones and the like won’t help you deal with longer-term stresses such as those induced by the covid-19 pandemic. Her team has designed an , as well as the general power of mindsets in influencing our health. After that, there are three steps to shifting from a negative to a positive stress mindset.

The first is identifying the source of your stress and how you respond to it – for me, deadlines, and procrastination. This helps by moving the reaction from the emotive, reflexive amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in more deliberate thinking and planning. The second step is to realise that we generally get stressed about things because we care about them, which is actually a positive. I get stressed about deadlines, for example, because I care about doing a good job.

Finally, you need to turn the stress response to your advantage. After all, what happens in our bodies when we are stressed evolved to help us deal with the toughest of situations. The rush of energy and boost of alertness are things we strive for at other times, but they need to be focused on the task at hand rather than on ways to avoid it, say. Reframing anxiety as excitement, for example, has been shown to help people do better in tests, negotiations and public speaking.

Keech, too, has been working on a simple intervention to help people turn their perception of stress on its head. Earlier this year, he published findings from a study of university students who were asked to visualise ways that the stress in their lives might have positive consequences. After two weeks, not only did they have a more positive mindset, but those who reported feeling the most stressed at the outset had tangible improvements in psychological well-being, perceived distress, mood, proactive coping behaviour and academic performance.

He thinks this visualisation approach could be applicable more generally. “For example, have there been times where you have experienced stress and then grown from the experience? Have there been times where having some pressure has assisted you to focus and get on with the job?” he says. If so, consider whether there are positive consequences of any stress that you are currently experiencing.

None of this spells the end of stress, of course. “Trying to get rid of your stress is like emptying out an ocean with a bucket. It’s just silly,” says Crum. “If you care about things in life, there’s going to be stress.” What matters is to keep in focus why you are feeling that stress – the things you care about – and use it to channel that evolutionarily helpful natural stress response.

Nor does it mean that all external causes of stress are good and should be tolerated. “This doesn’t mean you can just tell your employees they should work more because stress is good for them, or put up with an abusive partner,” says Crum. Rather, by helping people better utilise stress, the approach can help provide the focus and the motivation to get us out of stressful situations.

Ultimately, whatever is causing your stress, the way you view can become a self-fulfilling prophesy, so it really is time to stop stressing about it. “The mindset you have can be a defining factor in making that more positive, less detrimental reality occur,” says Crum. Given all the debilitating consequences feeling stressed can have, that can only be a good thing. I have a feeling my dentist will agree.

Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (samaritans.org). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines and websites for other countries.

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