This is an interesting speech by Dr. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University who has been studying stress and its effects on people’s health.
In short, studies found that stress can cause harm to your health IF YOU BELIEVE that stress is causing you harm. But in new experiments, for people who believe that stress is a normal part of life, people who believe that the stress symptoms that they feel are simply messages that their body is preparing to help them perform and succeed in a stressful situation, stress doesn’t appear to cause the same harm. Clearly, the mind is more powerful than we realize.
Please watch this video as the theory is well worth considering. Toward the end, Kelly points out that helping others and being socially involved are great antidotes to harm from stress, because it releases hormones that help your body recover from any damage that might have been caused.
I very much believe that your mind is far more powerful than most people realize, and that you can train your mind to react positively in almost any situation.
I.M. Optimisman