Cope With Stress by Convincing Yourself It's a Good Thing

Stress is one of those things we all have to deal with. But what if you could use stress to your advantage?

Brad Stulberg, coauthor of the book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (that’s a mouthful) recently spoke to Business Insider about how we can all use stressful situations to our advantage.

His recommendation?

Instead of looking at stress as something negative, where you need to tell your body to calm down because you’re too stressed, look at it as a positive “I’m excited. This is my body getting ready to give its best. These are my perceptions being heightened.”

Stulberg argues that at its core, stress is just a stimulus. A stimulus could be a workout, or it could be a performance review with your boss.

The feelings we have when we’re stressed only became negative when we labelled them that way.

“So in the acute sense, reframing stress as something that’s positive can be very beneficial, “ says Stuberg. “In the long-term sense, researchers come to a very similar conclusion, which is individuals that see trying times as challenges rather than threats, and encode stress as something that is a stimulus that will help them eventually grow because they will overcome it, they tend to perform better. And not only do they tend to perform better, they also have better health and even live longer."

The best way to deal with that stress might be to convince yourself that it’s not a bad thing.