How you think about stress,
impacts the stress response in profound ways. So this paper, rethinking
stress, the role of mindsets and determining stress, did a very simple set of manipulations. They had people in one
group listen to a lecture that effectively was titled, quote, the effects of stress are
negative and should be avoided. And that lecture included
information about how stress diminishes performance and
how it can diminish health and vitality learning and
performance, productivity. It increases uncertainty, et cetera. And all of that information is true. A separate group listened
to a lecture entitled: Experiencing Stress Improves
Health and Vitality. And again, that information is true. Now I realize that some of
you are probably still asking how can it be that stress
diminishes health and performance and stress also enhances
health and performance? And the answer lies in two things. One, the level of stress and
therefore the level of hormones that are released in
response to that stress, the duration over which
the stress response occurs. But the key variable here
is that our cognitive understanding about
what stress does impacts whether or not our physiology
goes down the direction of debilitating or
enhancing effects of stress. So we've got a condition here where people are being informed very
differently about what stress does. In one case, it's the
stress is bad message. In the other case, it's
the stress is good message. And there are many different
experiments within this paper, but one of the more
interesting ones, I believe, is where they looked at work performance, both in terms of performance
of what they call soft tasks. So these are somewhat easier
tasks as well as hard tasks. And when you look at the group
that was given information about how stress diminishes
performance in the soft tasks. So the somewhat easy tasks,
you don't see much change in their performance as you
compare before the learning about stress is diminishing
to after the learning, whereas the people who learn
that stress is enhancing actually experience some
improvement in work performance, even though the challenge
that they're facing isn't that great. So again, what this means
is that learning that stress can enhance performance by
providing people true information about how stress can enhance performance, can increase performance
even in the context of stuff that's not that hard, not that stressful. Even more interesting is that
when you look at performance on tasks that are considered hard, and you compare the
stresses diminishing group, meaning the group that was taught that stress is diminishing, and compare that to the
stresses enhancing group, you see a really divergent response. The people that learn that
stress diminishes performance did not improve at all. Whereas the people that learn that stress can enhance performance, enhance their performance significantly. Now, keep in mind all
they are doing is learning that stress can enhance their performance and then they're given the task and they're performing better. So that's pretty spectacular, right? There's no training session
that they went and did, they didn't practice these items that they were being tested on in between. They weren't given a bunch of drills to do and they didn't take a
lot of time to do it. They just heard a tutorial about how stress can enhance performance. And that, I believe is
remarkable because what it says is that our cognitive
appraisal about stress, which we all are going
to experience in life. Elevated heart rate
narrowing, a visual focus, shifting of blood away from the periphery. All of these things are
characteristic features of the stress response that we learn, especially in this day and age. 'Cause it's talked about a
lot in popular culture that, oh, you know, all of these mechanisms were put into us in
order for us to get away from the saber tooth tiger or the lion that's trying to eat us. Let's be fair, the stress response is there for a lot of reasons, not just because of saber
tooth, tigers and lions. I mean, that's kind of
a story that we make up. The stress response is
inherent not just to us, but to other species
as a way to mobilize us either away from things or toward things. We need to have somewhat of
a stress response in order to engage in adaptive challenge. Yes, it's true that hundreds
and thousands of years ago, those adaptive challenges
probably involved hunting, but they probably involved
social challenges as well. Do you think it was easy
for cavemen and women to engage socially and kind
of settle out their romantic interactions, et cetera? Do you think it was easy
for them to raise children? No, of course not. The stress response is there
for a variety of reasons, not just to get away from predators. The really exciting thing
that's been discovered in the course of Ali
crumb's work and other work in the last couple of decades
is that the stress response is neither good nor bad. The stress response depends
on whether or not you believe the sensations that you're experiencing. Elevated heart rate narrowing,
a visual focus, et cetera, are serving to enhance your performance or diminish your performance. And this study really points
to the fact that just learning that it can enhance performance,
can enhance performance. Now, I know a number of
you are probably saying, wait, but stress doesn't feel good, right? And oftentimes we experience
stress under conditions where we're trying to learn
or get good at something or listen better or do something, and it actually is
diminishing performance. And I think it's important
to acknowledge that, this study and studies like
it are not saying that stress becomes pleasant as a
sensation in the body, nor is it saying that it always leads to improved performance. I don't want you to think
that's the take home message. Sometimes it does, it can, as was demonstrated in
this research paper. But oftentimes, as we know, stress diminishes our performance. It takes us away from the
landmarks we want to hit. It takes us away from the
grades we want to get. It takes us away from
quote unquote showing up how we want to, right? No one wants to have the
blotchy skin and the sweating and the quaking of voice
when we're trying to do public speaking and things of that sort. No one wants any of that. What's important to
understand is that learning that stress is a way
of mobilizing resources in the body does two things. First of all, it allows us to
dampen or adjust the stress response in real time. And it allows us to understand
that that stress response heightens our level of focus
in a way that allows us to pay attention to the
things that are going wrong in a way that allows us to make correction to those errors in the future. So if you think back to that study, that ERP study where they
measured brain activity and they looked at people
who had a fixed mindset versus people who had a growth mindset, and the people who had a
growth mindset were paying more cognitive attention
to what was happening during errors and after errors. Well, this stress is enhancing
mindset is very powerful because what it does is
it shifts one's attention away from the kind of somatic
experience of, oh my goodness, my heart rate is elevated,
I'm sweating, I'm quaking, I sound terrible, I feel
terrible, I look terrible, et cetera, to a mode of
allocating more of our thinking, toward analyzing why
things might be going wrong and something else powerful
happens when we embrace a stresses enhancing mindset as well. When we embrace a stress
enhancing mindset, it turns out that some of the
very physiological processes that we call quote unquote
stress shift in important ways, some of those include the
duration over which the stress hormone cortisol is released. And in fact, I don't even
really want to call it a stress hormone because cortisol does so many other things as well. And it's not bad. You need cortisol, believe me, you want cortisol especially
released early in the day and in response to acute stressors. What you don't want is for
cortisol to stay elevated for long, long periods of time, and you especially don't want it to interfere with your sleep. So much so that I think at times I wonder whether or not our philosophy on stress should be that stress is fantastic for us, except when it interferes with our sleep. And when stress becomes terrible for us is when it starts to
be chronically elevated and especially when it
starts to inhibit our ability to sleep well enough and long enough. So the point here is that when we embrace a stresses enhancing mindset, we are able to have shorter
duration release of cortisol. We are also able to engage what's called increased stroke volume
under conditions of stress. This gets a little bit technical,
but the amount of blood that your heart can pump
with each beat turns out to be a key metric of stress. When we are very stressed,
even though we need to mobilize a lot of resources,
somewhat paradoxically, our total stroke volume
can actually be reduced. And we tend to shuttle
blood in other resources towards the core of our
body and towards major limbs and away from things like
our brain and our periphery. So one of the key measures
of how a stress response quote unquote is going
is how much peripheral blood flow there is. And when we are more relaxed
under conditions of stress, there tends to be more
peripheral blood flow. When we are more anxious, more panicked, under conditions of stress,
peripheral blood flow is lower. And in a remarkable set of
experiments ROM and colleagues have shown that when we
are just taught that stress can be enhancing and then we are placed into a stressful environment, either because we are imagining stress or we are experiencing real stress, and then our physiology is measured. What is observed is that
the total amount of blood that the heart can pump with
each beat is actually increased peripheral blood flow increases. And our ability to maintain
cognition to think clearly under conditions of stress increases. And again, the only
manipulation here is a tutorial about how stress can be enhancing, which is essentially what
I'm telling you right now. [MUSIC PLAYING]
