Is stress bad for your health?

Is there something amiss with our assumption that stress equals misery, while a stress-free life is bliss?Stress is one of those words that can mean so many things, it risks meaning nothing at all. If I told you my day was “very stressful” because I had too many places to be, you’d think me no more than slightly melodramatic. But if you were the sole survivor when a tourist bus plunged into a mountain gorge, you might reasonably describe the following years as “very stressful”, too. When a concept covers that much ground, it’s a sign there’s something dodgy about it, and in her new book, The Upside Of Stress, the psychologist Kelly McGonigal shows how dodgy. Case in point: in 2011, a study of 30,000 Americans linked high stress to a 43% increased risk of death, but – get this – only among those who already believed that stress is bad for your health.This is hardly the only evidence that something is amiss with our assumption that stress equals misery, while a stress-free life is bliss. In surveys, the most stressed countries are also among the happiest, and vice versa. (People in Mauritania, for example, are among the world’s least happy, yet report very low stress.) High stress is associated with higher levels of meaning in life, and there are even hints, in some research, that a reduction in stress can trigger depression. Which is awkward: it means all those books on beating stress and ads for stress-busting holidays might be making matters worse, by rei...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Health & wellbeing Life and style Psychology Source Type: news