Let Stress Make You Social: Advocacy for a New Science of Stress

“Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters,” remarked Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University.

This was an excerpt from a Ted Talk delivered 2013 by Dr. McGonigal, and five years later, I find it remains highly relevant to how we conduct our own personal and professional lives today. From family crises to challenging jobs, stress and anxiety are responsible for cardiovascular disease and subsequent deaths. She cited a 2013 statistic that people who experienced high levels of stress had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. More problematically, over the eight years that researchers were tracking deaths on this phenomenon, 282,000 people died prematurely from the belief that stress was bad for your health than stress itself.

Upon a newfound realization about these interconnected ideas of stress and anxiety, Dr. McGonigal highlighted that the issue at hand is that our bodies often treat stress poorly when really our goal should be framing our stress as a method beneficial to our own success whatever that might be.

To elaborate further on this distinction at her talk, she performed an experiment known as a social stress test to elevate the audiences’ stress and anxiety levels. This was signaled by physical changes such as an increased heartbeat, shortness of breath and sweating. When confronted with this stress, this biological change can emerge by taking the effort to make their stress social. Dr. McGonigal explained that this changed stress response is due to the presence of Oxytocin.

According to Dr. McGongial’s expertise, “Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about.”

In other words, it is critical to reach out to others for support when you’re feeling stressed as well as if someone close to you is experiencing stress. As a prevention mechanism for cardiovascular disease, this stress response has multiple helpful effects on the body. The Ted speaker noted that among these effects is how the heart has receptors to this hormone and ensures heart cells can be regenerated and heal whenever they suffer from stress-induced damage.

In the final moments of the talk, Dr. McGonigal brought to the audience’s attention another study of 1,000 adults ages 34 to 90 that examined their experiences with stress. It found that those who helped their friends, community or family experienced no stress-induced dying as opposed to those that did not.

After listening to this Ted Talk, it convinced me to rethink my ways in dealing with stress and hopefully can be the same for others in coping with any sort of stress they may encounter.