Heroic Interview: The Upside of Stress with Kelly McGonigal, PhD

You're listening to the upside of stress an optimal living interview with kelly mcgonigal and brian johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. We just had a great chat with Kelly McGonigal on the Willpower Instinct kind of part one on our two part series where we are blessed to be able to chat with Kelly coming. We covered a lot in the Willpower Instinct and today I'm really excited to chat about the Upside of Stress, which is Kelly's newest book Subtitle why Stress Is Good for your and how to Get Good At It. This book is just awesome. Quite literally changed my life and changed my perspective on how I frame challenges in my life. As a former super anxious perfectionist, the simple phrase I'm excited, which we're going to talk about today. Kelly, had I known that 20 plus years ago would have been just revolutionary. So I'm excited to chat about that. As we discussed in our chat on the Willpower Instinct, Kelly is a lecturer at Stanford where she got her PhD and is one of the leading thinkers and teachers in the field of science. Help translating all the great research being done in psychology, neuroscience and medicine into practical strategies we can apply today. Kelly, appreciate you and your time and excited to chat about the Upside of Stress.

Me too. I'm also excited.

All right. As we started our last chat, we defined willpower. Let's define stress because you do so in a compelling way in the book. And then we'll talk about why it is in fact good for us and how to get good at it.

Yeah. Well, let's start by acknowledging that any definition I give of stress could not possibly capture everything that people mean when they use the word stress, which is a funny problem when you're someone who wants to talk or teach about stress. So my definition is that stress is what happens when something that you care about is at stake. It's what arises in your mind. It's what happens in your body as your body tries to help you get ready to rise to the challenge. You it's what you think about and how your attention gets captured by what you care about and what you can do. It's an experience that you have and it's kind of a resource, right? That is it's a product of your body and your brain trying to help you deal with the fact that something that you care about is at stake. And that is a little bit different than some of the ways we talk about stress. Often I find people talk about stress as something outside of themselves. Like I'M a victim of all this stress in my life. Work is stressful and my relationship is stressful and school is stressful. And it's sort of like it's happening to me instead of happening within me. And I think there's lots of other sort of distinctions we could make about stress and stress versus suffering, stress versus trauma, short term stress, long term stress. There's a million distinctions people like to make. But that's a distinction that I care about because I think when you reclaim stress as something that is happening within you, it immediately opens doors for ways to change the way you think about stress, change the way you respond to stress, and change the way that you use stress so that it can be a catalyst for things like positive action, for learning and growth, even connecting with others.

Let's talk about stress mindsets. In the fascinating research that you unpack in the book in such a compelling way. The stress mindset, how we think about stress basically determines its effect on us. Can you tell us about that?

Well, it certainly influences its effect.

Influences is a better word. Thank you.

In a way, this was sort of bad news for me because as someone, as a health psychologist, I was taught and trained to view stress as the enemy. And in fact, it just was so easy if you wanted to explain why someone should adopt any behavior, get more sleep, change your diet, exercise, whatever. So, yeah, it'll reduce stress because we all know stress will kill you. Stress is the enemy. And I was indoctrinated into that. And about five years ago or so, this research started to come out that suggested that not only was stress not always harmful, sometimes it had really interesting benefits like resilience and meaning and growth, but that how people think about stress might actually determine whether you're more likely to experience the harmful effects of stress that we always associate with stress, like illness or heart disease or depression, or whether you experience some of the benefits of stress, like a sense of meaning in life, like a sense of growth and purpose, stronger relationships, greater compassion, even longevity and resilience. And I said this was mind blowing to me because it made me realize that I was doing a lot of the perpetuating of the mindset or the belief that stress is harmful. And these studies started coming out saying, if you believe that your stress is harmful, it's more likely to be harmful. Some of the first studies that sort of knock me upside the head one found that stress was only increasing the risk of mortality across a decade among people who believe that their stress was harming their health and among people who had a Lot of stress in their lives, didn't view it as harmful. They were the most likely to be alive at the end of the study. Another study found the same thing, not for death, but for heart disease, that it was when people believed their stress was harmful that it was predicting heart disease two times more likely to develop heart disease over the next 20 years. And studies like this started coming out suggesting that if stress is harmful, believing it's harmful is going to really amplify its harms. And thank God, people started looking at some of the. Like whether embracing stress could actually mitigate some of that harm and lead to some of its benefits. Because otherwise I would, you know, then you're just in. You're sort of falling down the rabbit hole. Even more of believing stress is bad for you will kill you. So then it's just don't believe that stress is bad for you. Because if you believe that stress is bad for you, it's going to kill you. It's sort of the same mindset of, like, you know, there's something bad that's killing you. And it was so important to find this research that said, you know what, if you accept stress, it changes you. If you embrace stress, it changes you. If you welcome stress, it changes you in ways that we actually value. So it's not just about trying to run away from how we think about stress, but that there are actually ways to think about stress that empower us, that create health, and that support our ability to reach our goals.

Fantastic. And you share the great story of your own evolution in your relationship to stress in your TED Talk, which I didn't mention in the intro, but if you're one of the few people who have not watched that TED Talk yet, who's into this stuff, check it out. Google Ted Kelly McGonigal stress and watch that extraordinary presentation which preceded this book. So two mindsets. One, stress is harmful. Two, stress is enhancing. I'd love to talk about some of the big ideas that I really love that help us kind of embrace that enhancing nature. One distinction you made that was, I thought, awesome is the challenge response. Can you talk to us about the challenge response?

Yes. So when people think about stress and when stress is harmful and why it's toxic, they're really thinking about a particular kind of stress response that psychologists call a threat response. And if you're looking at sort of animal research, it would be that fight or flight response where animals or you as a human being, you feel threatened, you feel like you can't control a situation, you feel Kind of alone in your struggle and you go into this kind of survival mode that really isn't healthy or helpful in a lot of the situations that we face. It is this kind of survival mode where you're just going to lash out, attack, or try to get out of the situation you're in. And in the body, it's associated with things like heightened inflammation and blood pressure and changes in your brain that sort of make it difficult to see the big picture and also make it more difficult to connect with other people. And that's a threat response. And when we hear people say that stress can impair performance, it impairs learning, it makes you hostile, or whatever sort of the things we don't want. In many situations, they're really talking about a threat response. And in the last 20 years, psychologists have been championing this other type of stress response, which is also built into our biology, that if we are in a situation where something we care about is at stake and we think we have the resources to deal with it, or we think we aren't alone, or we find sort of deep meaning in it when any of these things are true, we often have a different kind of stress response, one that gives us a ton of energy, but that isn't associated with some of the toxic or harmful health side effects of a threat response. It affects the brain differently so that we have more access to information in our environment, we are better able to connect with others. Just makes us more skillful. And when you look at people performing under high levels of stress, whether it's an athlete in a competition or it's a student taking an exam, or it's someone going into a very difficult negotiation. People who have challenged responses physiologically and mentally, they are stressed out, but they believe they have the resources to handle it, or they feel connected to something bigger than themselves. They have a stress response that helps them do very well. And the stronger their stress response, often the better they do. And that's very different than what most people believe, which is that the people who are excelling are calm, that they aren't experiencing stress, that they are physiologically calm, they aren't having adrenaline and cortisol and stress hormones. And in fact, it is very clear when you look at people who are peak performers across domains, if you ask them, do you get anxious? They experience the same levels of anxiety as people who are not performing as well. They just interpret it differently. They're like, ah, anxiety. This is energy. And even just interpreting your own body's stress response is helpful, seems to actually Transform a threat response into a challenge response. Because now your own anxiety is a resource that's going to help you do well and help you excel. And it's not the case that people out there who are acting with courage, performing at their peak levels, it's not the case that they aren't stressed out. They're often stressed out in a slightly different way. And one of the things that I'm really passionate about now is helping people find the challenge response in situations where they might otherwise have a threat response.

I'm reminded of our last chat where you talked about the clear awareness of being able to observe the emotion or the pain or whatever it is that we're experiencing and just see it. And I'm thinking of kind of the experimenter looking at the physiological response as neutral data and the achievers among us who are out there in this super focused mode. And as you say, focused but not fearful, have chosen to look at that physiological information as resources rather than a sign that something's wrong. Right?

Yeah. And you know what's interesting is it can also be fearful. The thing is, there's fear and then there's being paralyzed by fear. Right now I'm in the middle of teaching my Science of Stress class at Stanford, and we just yesterday had a long conversation about courage and fear and. And reappraising anxiety and stress as a resource. The thing is, it's still going to feel like fear. Your heart is still going to be pounding. You may still have a thought in your head that says, I don't know if I can do it. And yet there's some other part of you that can just take the perspective of, I'm worried about this because I care and my heart is pounding because my heart wants to give me energy. My heart is in it, and you don't actually have to get rid of the fear. And somehow that's important. Right. A lot of times people want this research to say, if I just accept my stress, then I'll calm down. Like, I'll accept the anxiety because then that will make it go away. And what a challenge response is really about is just trusting yourself to handle the experience you're having and that you don't need to interpret that anxiety as a sign that you're going to choke or as a sign that you need to escape because you can't handle this. You need to calm down. But I think it's important to be really clear about that because often people will be like, well, I tried it and I was still anxious. I was like, yeah, you're probably always going to be anxious. And I get nervous when I'm not anxious before something that is important because in a way that suggests I'm somehow dissociated or not engaged. And when I talk about embracing stress, I'm not kidding that part of what embracing stress means is you're not secretly hoping that life will become less stressful if you just accept it, or that you'll never experience anger or anxiety or overwhelm again. If you just somehow find the right stress mindset. It really is about embracing it again.

Which is a big theme of our last chat. And I just love this. And then you've said it a couple of times of just hold that in a bigger context where you know that you have, or at least you believe you have what it takes to deal with it. And if you don't perform the way you want that, you have what it takes to respond to that as feedback and to get a little bit better next time. But I love the distinction of, look, this isn't about turning off what we call, quote, fear that is still going to be flowing through us. One of the ways that really helped me kind of operationalize this is I'm excited. And actually it allowed me to step out and to see it and then proactively say, oh, yeah, there it is again. I care about this. I want to do my best. I'm a little nervous that I won't and let me just go out and do it. But I'm excited about this. This is awesome. Let's go step into it and use that energy.

A great study coming out of Harvard Business School. And you know, people do the funniest things, try to stress people out. In that study, they were doing like karaoke competitions and giving public, public speeches. And they asked people to either say out loud, I'm excited or I'm calm, as a way to deal with their pre performance anxiety. And in that study, the people who chose to say I'm excited, they performed objectively better than people who tried to calm down. And there's a version of that that works in my experience in any situation, sometimes I'm excited is not going to be quite right. I was thinking yesterday, talking to a woman who'd gotten really bad news about one of her children, and she was describing, like, running to the bathroom and sliding down the wall of the stall just in her head saying, I can't handle this, I can't handle this. And in that moment, she was like, oh, I can handle this. I am handling this. And it's okay. That part of handling this is wondering if I can handle this and having the sense that she was going to handle it because she cared so much. And to me, that's the same thing as when you're obviously not calm. You don't say, I need to be calm. In that pre performance mode, you can say I'm excited. Because there's a ring of truth in that. Often before we perform, we are excited. And I encourage people to look for the reframe that is also true in that moment. It doesn't work if you're just completely lying to yourself. But the thing about stress is, and the truth about humans capacity to deal with adversity is that whatever that first thought is, the opposite is almost always true. And part of this mindset flexibility is when you have a voice that says, you can't do this or this is too much, that that voice is not the truth. What it's doing is. It's kind of like provoking you to own the other opposite. Okay, I can do this. This is real. And I'm gonna rise to the challenge. That part of just like part of anxiety is I'm excited. Part of anxiety is also I'm courageous. That you know you can't have courage without fear. And that anxiety, why can't it be the sign that you're courageous?

So powerful and so important again to hold it all. And you talk about the fact this isn't. We're not talking about being Pollyannish about it.

No, I'm not an optimist. The funniest thing about writing this book and talking about this research is getting lumped into categories that I had not previously been lumped into before. Like sort of, you know, wishful thinking, kind of super uber positive people. And it's so funny because actually sort of the fundamental basis of all the work that I do is acknowledging the reality of suffering. Yet I understand that it's very easy to hear this research and think that what it's about is just think positive, when actually it's kind of the opposite. It's no fundamentally accept the things that you think you can accept and bring to that experience. Things that are also true, like you care or you can rise to the challenge or you aren't actually alone in this. Things that are fundamentally true. And that's very different than the kind of positive thinking that everything's going to turn out great or everything happens for a reason, which is not really part of my. That's not really part of my natural mindset.

My favorite Chats is with Gabrielle Oettingen in her Rethinking Positive Thinking. It's just what you both talk about so powerfully, and I think so importantly is, is you need to rub these ideals up against reality. And that's where the power is. It's not in the Pollyannish visioning and what really ultimately becomes delusion and just so much less effective. Again, I appreciate your distinctions on that and how clearly you make them in this book and the willpower, instinct and everything else you do. You talked about meaning as another vehicle to help us cultivate a mindset that sees stress as enhancing. Can you talk to us about that?

Yeah. And this is one of the practices that I actually do before I even get out of bed in the morning. But to give some context for this, one of the surprising kind of side benefits of stress is that it seems to be associated with meaning in life. And one of my favorite studies to look at this came out of Stanford, where researchers asked a bunch of teenagers to middle late age adults whether or not they considered their life to be meaningful. And they asked all of these other questions to try to find out, if you want to know if someone's life is meaningful, what else should you ask them? And some of the most consistent predictors of meaning were any way they asked about stress, whether they asked about how much adversity people had faced in their past, whether they asked people, how much stress are you under right now in your life? How much pressure, how overwhelmed are you? Or even how many minutes a day people spend worrying? All of those, the higher they were, the more likely people were to believe that their lives had meaning. And when you look at more research beyond that study, it seems to be that the reason stress is linked to meaning is that the most meaningful goals and roles and relationships we have in our lives are almost always also the biggest sources of stress. Relationships, parenting, school goals, work and career goals, personal health goals, personal dreams. That when we engage with them fully, wholeheartedly, life is stressful. And it's not necessarily that the stress itself is what creates the meaning, although there's an argument to be made for that. But it's also just the case that if you want to have a meaningful life, you have to understand that your life is going to be stressful. And when people appreciate that, it's often easier in moments of stress to ask yourself, what do I care about? Why does this matter? What is the meaning behind the reason? I'm so frustrated now or I'm so worried right now? And when people do that In a similar way to deciding that you trust yourself to handle an experience, to say you're excited when you're anxious. When people choose to connect to the meaning behind their stress, it does seem to change the biology of the stress response in a way that is helpful. It changes the way they interact with others in a way that is helpful. It helps them connect. It gives them a greater sense of purpose. And one of the practices that I use to do this is before I even get out of bed in the morning, you know, it only takes like 30 seconds, 60 seconds. I think to myself, what is today about? What are the challenges I know that I'm going to face? And what are my values that I feel like are most connected to that, that are going to be sort of guides for how I want to engage with these challenging situations, or the reason that I said yes and allowed myself to be put in these challenging situations? Sort of, whatever it is. And that's been a great exercise for me. And it's a version of an exercise I write about in the book that has been shown to have very long lasting effects on people's well being. Just to basically connect to your values every day.

That's amazing. You literally do that every morning?

Yes, I do. And every now and then my husband will be trying to talk to me and I'm like, brian. My husband's name is Brian. Brian. I'm doing the values thing. Come back in a minute.

Wow. So starting the day, what challenges am I going to face today? And what values are those associated with? Why am I doing that? Why does it matter? That's awesome.

Yeah. And it's also helpful to know sort of what your key values are. I mean, that's a different exercise in itself. I always do with my stress workshops or courses. And like, I know that I have a few that are very important to me. Compassion is one and courage is another one. We've talked in both of our conversations now about courage as being, you know, sort of a key source of strength for people who experience a lot of anxiety or have difficulty taking action when things are difficult? And compassion is just sort of a personal value for me. But it surprises me sometimes what pops into my mind in a way that's been really. It's just interesting that I might not have thought one of my core values was integrity or listening. And yet somehow when I think this is what's going to happen today, it just comes to mind. And it's been an interesting exercise too. And just also understanding what it is I want to bring to Stressful situations or how I want to be in the world.

Again. I love that. I want to circle back a little bit to what you were talking about with the research, which is just fascinating to me that if you want to find the depth of someone's meaning, find out how stressed they are, basically. Right. It just made me think of the difference between happiness and flourishing and kind of the emotional state of feeling good smiley face style all the time, which a lot of times in the self help, kind of positive thinking world, we think that's the ideal outcome. And everything that you're sharing or that I interpret that you're sharing is the distinction between that and a sense of flourishing which comes with all the stress and anxiety. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why it's so important for us to get that?

Yeah. And let's be clear. Stress is often negatively correlated with that particular type of happiness. The sense of everything being good, feeling content about life. A lot of different ways that people measure happiness as an emotional state, stress is often negatively correlated with that. And I think that that's one of the reasons why people have such an aversion to stress. Or this idea that the ideal life is stress free is because we also have this idea that the ideal life is one in which we are content and experiencing pleasure all the time. And that is one hypothesis about happiness. And there are a lot of people for whom seeking pleasure is really like that is the framework for their lives. And if that's the framework for your life, you know, avoiding stress might get you closer to it, I don't know. But it's not my framework for life. And I found it very useful. The distinction between a hedonic approach to happiness versus a eudaimonic or flourishing approach to happiness that says, you know, what is your aim in life? Is it to avoid discomfort and experience pleasure? Or is it to grow in ways that are personally meaningful, contribute to something bigger than yourself? And to me, just through direct experience, that somehow I actually prefer that outcome or that experience over the experience that I might describe as purely pleasurable. And I don't know that that's the case for everyone. But I deeply appreciate the movement in positive psychology to move towards talking about flourishing and this other hypothesis about what it means to be happy. It's definitely consistent with my experience. And if you want that, then you have to basically say, I'm willing to have a stressful life. Because stress is often the thing that goes along with the activities and the challenges we need to grow in meaningful ways. And contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

Amen. I love it. This is the hedonic eudaimonic. Eudaimonic juxtaposition. And it goes back to our last conversation too, about we can choose pleasure in the immediate term or we can choose excellence over the long term. That concept of arete that I come back to a lot in my work and the ability and willingness to consistently tolerate discomfort in service to a goal we endorse and that we're passionate about. And to say yes to it all ultimately, rather than deny and put a big old yellow smiley face sticker over our lives. Right. One of my favorite ideas from your book is a personal story you shared when you were getting your PhD at Stanford. And it was just one of those nights of just trying to make it work. And I forget who it was. The staff member in your building on campus.

Oh, wait, now, this is not my story. This was Ali Crum's story.

Oh, I thought that was just another cold night. Cold.

That is Ali Crumb. Is it?

I got it totally wrong. Okay.

I wish that were my story, the reason I shared it in Talking so well, let me just share for listeners. So Ali Crum is one of the leading mindset researchers in psychology, and she actually is one of the psychologists who came up with this term, stress mindset. And so in talking about her work, I share this story that she often shares, which is that one night when she was finishing her dissertation and she was in the basement of the psychology department, she didn't know she was going to be able to finish her dissertation. It was kind of all falling apart and she was feeling alone and self doubt and all of that. And I think it was the tech guy in her building, sort of a loner himself, sort of working late at night. He just opened the door and leaned in and said, just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest. And then he closed the door and walked away. And it was like this really weird, creepy moment for her. And she was the one who, like, you know, later on when she couldn't sleep worrying about her dissertation, she was like, yeah, this is just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest. That when you have a challenge in your life that you have chosen to take on, that you don't expect it to be easy. And that part of why you are doing it is because of how you know you will be changed by going through that experience. And one of my favorite definitions of resilience is actually simply to have the courage to grow from stress, that you get to choose to play a role in how life transforms you by putting yourself in stressful situations and making a choice about how you want to be changed by them. So that's her great story. And I share it because when I shared it with students, my students have often told me they think that now, whether it's a parenting challenge or an academic challenge or they're going through cancer treatment, even you can think, okay, life is not supposed to be easy. And if I understand the meaning behind it, it's just another cold, dark night on the side of Everest. And you can take that perspective and think, what is the meaning behind this challenge? Why do I want to get to the top? What does it say about me that I'm willing to do this and able to do this? And it's a perspective that often gives people courage in times where you could more easily despair.

Super inspiring. What have we not talked about that you want to make sure we highlight?

You know, in our last conversation, we ended by thinking about how willpower is social. And that's also something that is very important. New finding from the science of stress that part of what makes us good at stress is when we tap into a kind of bigger than self motivation where we let stress be a catalyst for connecting with others. And that that is also built into our biology. It's called a tendon befriend response. And when we feel threatened or when we see people we care about, communities we care about, even ideas we care about threatened, often we are filled with the courage we need to take action to defend or protect others or the things that we care about. And the more we actually choose to take that kind of mindset, where we choose to feel not alone in our stress and suffering, to look for who else needs help, to use our own experiences as a way to help others, any way that we can connect to that kind of bigger than self tend to befriend mindset. It seems to create physical and emotional resilience. And that's part of what it means to be good at stress. We spent a lot of time talking about feeling up to the challenge, courage and excitement, excitement and having a challenge response. And then this is sort of one of the other ways we can be good at stress is to consciously choose to not feel alone in whatever we're going through, whether that means asking for the help that we need, asking for wisdom and advice, or choosing to believe that we have something of value to offer others who are struggling. And that can be incredibly transformative, particularly when it comes to the big stress, when you look at what helps people recover from trauma and loss. It's the ability to feel like you went through that so that you could help others who are dealing with it. And it kind of changes the narrative of that experience in a way that gives us hope and meaning. So leave people with that. They can learn more about that in the book.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've covered a ton in both of our chats and given all of your research into such a broad array of fields and kind of domains related to optimal living, if you were only going to share one piece of advice, one piece of wisdom with someone passionate about optimizing their lives and actualizing their potential, what would that one piece of wisdom be?

Pay more attention to how other people are struggling or suffering. It is the. I think the biggest thing that gets in, in the way of human well being is a kind of self focus that cuts you off from the resources that are available. When you pay more attention to helping others or at least seeing the reality of human experience, that we're sort of all going through this together. And the more we get stuck in only examining our own experiences, the more we get stuck in a mindset where we feel alone and we believe that what we're experiencing is evidence that there's something fundamentally wrong with us or wrong with our lives. And the more we pay attention to others, I think the more we get all of the resources that become available when we experience a sense of connection, of compassion and common humanity.

Thank you, Kelly. So the upside of Stress, as you've heard me rave about. Amazing book, highly recommend it. One of my Top Books in 2015. Unquestionably tied for first and it's going to stay there. Life changing.

What else? What is it tied with? Maybe I haven't read it yet. Give me some recommendations.

That's a good question. I've just been all in this year, so I've done 120of these this year. So Resilience actually is another great book by Eric Greitens. I mean, that just blew me away as well. But this book is just, it's just so fundamentally important. It just makes such a powerful shift. It has in my life and in my family's life. And I just, it's something that I think everyone will benefit from and I hope a lot of people will go deeper into this book. And then all of your other works, we talked about the TED talk, Check that out. The willpower instinct. Kelly, we mentioned or we talked about some of your other work you have going on, but can you just share a little bit more about your other work and just let people know how they can access. Obviously they can go to kellymcgonigal.com, but what other things are you doing that people can drill into deeper?

You know I work with the Stanford center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and we have created a nine week course that is a compassion training and self compassion training and we've now trained teachers all over the world who are offering this course and we also have on our center's website a ton of resources for people who are interested in the science of compassion and the science of empathy. So people can find out more about all of that, the research side as well as the personal practice side by going to CCare CCare Stanford EDU and that is a very big part of my life right now.

Wonderful. Well thank you again and look forward to connecting in the future on more of your amazing work.

Thank you.

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