India CutlerConfidence and Self Help Expert

The truth about stress most people miss | Mel Robbins #Shorts

28 May 2026 · 0 min

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In this short dialogue, the speakers explore what stress actually is, tracing its origin to a physics term that describes the force applied to an object. They explain that stress is not inherently bad; a certain amount can be positive, driving evolution and change. The conversation then describes the body's acute stress response—elevated heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration while non‑essential functions like digestion are suppressed—to help survive immediate threats. The key point is that this response evolved for short‑term danger (e.g., escaping a predator), but modern life constantly triggers the same response through everyday hassles such as bills, school issues, workplace conflicts, and social stressors. This chronic activation leads to a tipping point where stress becomes harmful, turning an adaptive mechanism into a persistent health burden.

We talk about stress and it's like, I feel stressed. I feel stressed because of the headlines. I feel stressed because of what's happening to my kid at school. I feel stressed because, you know, I'm mad at my spouse right now. But what is stress actually? It's a physics term, right? So it evolved from the world of physics.
What happens when you apply a force to something? The issue is that we have now changed it and apply it to all of these things that happen in our life. Now, stress in and of itself is not a bad thing. We all need some stress in our lives. Why? Stress can be positive because it can push us. It can push us to evolve and change. Okay. The point is that there's a tipping point where the stress then becomes negative. Our stress response is meant to be a place or a function for us to survive so that if we're escaping a lion in the wild, we turn it on. Our heart rate goes up, our blood pressure goes up, our respiratory rate goes up. We turn off all the non-essential functions, our digestion, our reproduction, our growth. So we can live. The issue is that when you're in the wild and you're escaping an animal, and then you escape, your stress response goes off. In our current-day society, we turn on the stress response for all those things you just talked about. We get a bill in the mail that's difficult to handle, we hear something at school, our friend says something to us, we feel bullied, we, uh, you know, go to work and our boss is, you know, tough on us. Every little insult during our day causes a stress reaction. And so we are turning that stress reaction on constantly, over and over again, chronically, day after day after day.
Mm.
And you can imagine how damaging this can be to our bodies on the inside. So the point is, even though we have this stress response, guess what? We are not victim to it. We can mount a resilient response. We can actually turn it off, dial it down, and counteract it, right? That's the purpose of the resilient response.