You Might Also Like: The School of Greatness

**Lewis Howes** (0:01)
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Welcome back everyone to The School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest, Kelly McGonigal is in the house, Stanford University researcher on psychology who specializes in understanding the mind-body connection, which is what I'm fascinated about. She's also a bestselling author of a number of books, The Willpower Instinct, The Upside of Stress and her latest book, The Joy of Movement, which explores why physical exercise is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety and loneliness. I'm so excited to hear because for me, I've been studying the mind-body connection since I was a child. Some of my first memories are about how the mind and thought has power over the physical body and curing disease in the body through a religion that I grew up in called Christian Science, which is all about the thought and mind practices founded by a female in the 1800s. I'm curious, you talk about how we think about stress can either save our lives or kill us. Can you tell us why our thought around stress is more important than the stress itself?

**Kelly McGonigal** (3:48)
Yeah. I do try to avoid the language of like, if you think about stress the wrong way, it will kill you, in part because I actually came to regret that I had done a lot of teaching and speaking and writing about how stress itself can kill you. Because I'm a health psychologist, I was trained to view stress as the enemy.
If you look at the science, you can find evidence that stress increases your risk of everything people don't want, from heart disease to depression, all of it. But almost 10 years ago, I came across this study that made me really rethink stress. It was a study that tracked about 30,000 adults for almost a decade in the US. At the beginning of the study, they asked people, first, how stressful is your life? Then also, do you believe that your stress is harmful? Do you believe that stress is bad for your health? They followed them to find out, is it true that stress kills? What they found is that for the subset of people who had a very stressful life and most strongly believed that their stress was harmful, they had a 43 percent increased risk of dying from any cause over the next decade. But the people who had the most stressful lives and did not strongly believe that stress was bad for them, they were the most likely to be alive at the end of the decade. And this study caught my attention because, first of all, it suggests that stress is not always the enemy, at least it's not always a risk factor in the way that we think about it. But then also it was making me think like, how many of those deaths was I personally responsible for by going out there trying to convince people that stress was bad for their health, and that the stress will kill your brain cells and eventually kill you.