Better, Faster, Stronger: How Stress Can Fuel Personal Growth and Development

Let’s talk about stress, baby

And antifragility

Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things

That may be

Let’s talk about stress

— My attempt at parodying a 1991 Salt-N-Pepa classic

Stress is an unavoidable part of our daily lives. How can we mitigate stress so that it doesn’t cause adverse health outcomes? How can we leverage the benefits of stress in order to help us stay motivated? Is there a sweet spot when it comes to stress exposure?

A Stressed Out Society

Last time, I briefly mentioned the stress hormone cortisol and the role it plays in appetite regulation. When we’re stressed or sleep-deprived, cortisol levels spike, increasing appetite and causing us to crave comfort foods. Unfortunately, modern society is chock-full of stressors.

Constantly getting inundated with text messages, emails, and Slack notifications can overstimulate your “fight or flight” response, leading to chronically elevated cortisol levels. This in turn can impair proper functioning of your prefrontal cortex, the region of your brain responsible for good decision-making. Inhibition of the PFC can cause us to engage in risky behaviors like texting while driving.

Continuous engagement of your sympathetic nervous system also causes your adrenal glands to release adrenaline and norepinephrine, which speed up your heart rate and raise your blood pressure, respectively. This is why chronic stress can contribute to hypertension over time.

The autonomic nervous system in your brain communicates with the enteric nervous system in your gut, which explains how stress can lead to digestive issues. Cortisol allows for the mobilization of your muscles at the expense of “rest and digest” activities such as the normal rhythmic contractions that move food along your digestive tract. Stress can also change the composition of your gut bacteria, which can affect your digestive and overall health.

Chronic stress can dampen immunity, making you more vulnerable to infections and slowing the rate at which injuries heal. Curbing chronic stress is even essential for longevity, as high levels of stress are associated with shortened telomeres, the shoelace tip ends of chromosomes that measure a cell’s age. Telomeres allow for DNA replication and shorten with each successive cell division. When telomeres become too short, a cell can no longer divide and dies.

Mindsets About Stress

Psychologists define stress as the physical and mental response to events that we consider challenging or threatening. In other words, stress is a reaction to a disruptive stimulus, which means that the amount of stress we experience is largely dependent on how we appraise situations. When you miss a flight or someone schedules a last-minute meeting at work, you can either roll with the punches or get worked up.

Stressful situations are inevitable, but the way in which we respond is what really matters. If we view stressful situations as challenges that we can control and master rather than as threats that are insurmountable, we will perform better in the short term and stay healthier in the long run.

Stanford Psychology Professor Alia Crum describes mindsets as portals between conscious and subconscious processes. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, she conducted an experiment in which she asked volunteers to watch videos about the nature of stress. One group didn’t watch any videos, one watched videos that detailed the debilitating side of stress, and another group watched media that emphasized the enhancing nature of stress.

The goal was to change people’s mindsets and observe the results. Crum found that just nine minutes of videos a week were enough to change people’s mindsets about stress and the incidence of physiological symptoms associate