Can Embracing Stress Actually Help Us?

In 2012, researchers followed 30,000 American adults for eight years and asked two questions: how much stress they had experienced, and whether they believed stress was harmful to their health. The results were striking. People who had experienced severe stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying prematurely—but only if they believed stress was bad for them. Those who experienced severe stress but saw it as helpful rather than harmful were actually the least likely to die prematurely of anyone in the study, including people who reported little to no stress at all. This finding sits at the center of a growing body of research suggesting that our relationship with stress matters as much as the stress itself.

The Stress Spectrum and Common Myths

Stress is not a single thing. The host distinguishes between three levels: acute stress (short-term arousal that peaks and subsides quickly, which can be either motivating or threatening), episodic acute stress (frequent acute episodes that prevent a return to calm baseline, often tied to demanding professions or difficult life circumstances), and chronic stress (the persistent, seemingly unmovable kind linked to financial dread, family trauma, or chronic illness). Only chronic stress is consistently harmful to health.