The Hidden Truth About Stress — What You Aren’t Being Told

By Carolanne Wright

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Believe it or not, the all too familiar feeling of sweaty palms, racing heart and clenched stomach can actually be good for you.

Each of us has been there, that downward spiral of stress. Juggling the demands of career, family and a fast-paced lifestyle, it’s no wonder tension levels are reaching epic proportions as we go about our day. To make matters worse, the media promotes the idea that stress is downright deadly. Just this fact alone is enough to send us into a tailspin of anxiety and worry. But one renegade psychologist is putting our assumptions about stress to the test — with surprising results.

An Unexpected “Aha” Moment

Kelly McGonigal is well-versed in the topic of stress. As an author, Stanford psychologist and pioneer in morphing academic science into practical, everyday use, she has long championed the notion that chronic stress is a silent killer and that we should minimize it at all costs.

But then she came across a study inHealth Psychology.

McGonigal tells the Washington Post:

“The first real trigger for me was a study published online in 2011 that showed that having a high level of stress only increased people’s risk of mortality when it was combined with belief that stress was bad for health. The same was not true among people who had high levels of stress, but didn’t believe it was bad.

That study confused me. It was a real existential crisis for me, because my mission as a health psychologist is to help people. I’d been indoctrinated that stress is the enemy, and we need to reduce or avoid stress. That was number one in all my training. That’s what you hear in the Zeitgeist. And the message underlying that is that if your life is stressful, you’re doing something wrong, or there’s something fundamentally wrong with your life. There’s no hope there. Then you’re more likely to isolate and withdraw, and practice avoidance coping, like drinking.”

She began to dig deeper and found other researchers were coming to the same conclusion: it’s the perception that stress is harmful to health which causes disease, not the stress itself.

For McGonigal, this understanding was a game changer.

CONTINUE READING:

Previous articles by Carolanne Wright:

• Dr Sebi: The Man Who Cures Aids, Cancer, Diabetes and More
• Safety of Merck’s Gardasil in Question as Rhode Island Mandates HPV Vaccine for Children
• Chronic Lyme Disease: A Modern Plague the Government Chooses to Ignore
• Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 1000 Times More Toxic Than Glyphosate Alone
• Big Pharma and Organized Crime — They are More Similar Than You May Think
• Over 100 Scientific Studies Agree: Cannabis Annihilates Cancer
• Emotional Energetic Healing: The Future of Medicine is Here
• Why Every Parent Should Consider Unschooling
• The Greenhouse of the Future: Grow Your Own Food Year-Round With This Revolutionary System
• First U.S. City Produces More Electricity Than It Uses — With 100% Renewable Technology
• Autistic Boy with Higher IQ Than Einstein Discovers Gift After Removal from State-Run Therapy
• Enhance Spiritual, Mental and Physical Well-being with a Pineal Gland Detox

• Follow Wake Up World On…

  [FACEBOOK]: http://www.facebook.com/joinwakeupworld (An interactive community of over 2,800,000)

  [PINTEREST]: http://pinterest.com/wakeupword/

  [TWITTER]:  http://twitter.com/joinwakeupworld

  [YOUTUBE]: http://www.youtube.com/joinwakeupworld          

  [GOOGLE PLUS]: https://plus.google.com/112452105795129310867/posts

  [WEBSITE]: http://wakeup-world.com