Many people want to know how to reduce anxiety — but what if the key isn’t eliminating stress, but changing how you relate to it? What if stress isn’t your enemy but actually helps you become more resilient? A landmark study of 30,000 people suggests exactly that.
Researchers asked participants two simple questions:
Eight years later, when examining public health records, they discovered something remarkable. Those reporting high levels of stress were indeed 43% more likely to die – but only if they believed stress was harmful to their health.
People who experienced high stress but didn’t view it as harmful were actually less likely to die than those with low stress who believed stress was bad for them.
This study revealed an important truth: your belief about stress may be more important than the stress itself.
Research from the American Psychological Association highlights that building resilience is a key factor in learning how to reduce anxiety and thrive under pressure.
This research, and numerous follow-up studies have confirmed the same findings.
Most forms of stress aren’t inherently bad for you. In fact, stress is generally good for you, it’s what you believe about it that causes problems.
Why do you believe stress is bad for you?
Hans Selye, a prominent Hungarian endocrinologist working in the 1930s, noticed that rats kept in terrible conditions became ill and died more frequently. He used the generic word “stress” to describe the awful experiences these rats endured.
Because Selye stated that stress made the rats sick, it was assumed that all stress, regardless of intensity or duration, had the same negative impact on health.
Even now, most of what you read and hear about stress’s harmful effects comes from studies of pathologically-stressed lab rats.
But human stress is not the same.
Your body doesn’t respond to life’s challenges in the same way these poor rats did to their extreme conditions. You produce a different combination and ratio of hormones depending on the type of stress, the context (what it means to you), and how you believe stress affects you. Many of these hormones are actually beneficial.
Have you ever felt compelled to reach out to a partner or friend during a rough day? That’s oxytocin at work – a hormone produced during your stress response that promotes social connection and bonding. It also relaxes the blood vessels around your heart, making it cardio-protective. Have you ever heard that stress is good for your heart? Probably not. But in this case, it absolutely is.
How about learning from stressful situations? Have you ever experienced heightened alertness during the build-up to a deadline, presentation, exam, or sporting event? Along with cortisol, that’s DHEA, a hormone produced during stress that encourages the growth and connection of new brain cells. It helps you learn.
Stress helps you rise to challenges, giving you energy and sharpening your focus. It enhances learning, improves heart health, and deepens social connections. This is all confirmed by science.
As Dr. Kelly McGonigal explains:
“Most people believe that the body’s stress response is uniformly harmful. From the conventional point of view, your body betrays you every time your hands get clammy, your heart races, or your stomach twists into knots. To protect your health and happiness, the thinking goes, your number one priority should be to shut down the stress response.”
This is exactly the advice I’ve been following and giving most of my career.
I was wrong.
If you’re looking for practical ways on how to reduce anxiety, these stress management techniques can help you change how your body and mind respond.
Have you noticed how similarly excitement and anxiety affect your body? Both increase your heart and breathing rate. Both make your palms sweat. Both make you more attentive. Both give you butterflies in your stomach. Both create muscle tension.
These responses prepare your body to perform for something you consider important.
Your increased heart and breathing rates get more blood and oxygen to your brain and muscles so you can think clearer and move faster. Those butterflies are reminders that you care about what you’re about to engage with. The tension in your muscles is your body preparing for action.
Invite these changes in your body as a racecar driver would appreciate the sound of their engine revving at the starting line. You need that energy to perform and win.
We tend to welcome excitement as beneficial while trying to block anxiety as harmful. We open up to excitement and try to reduce anxiety.
They’re the same physiological response – you just talk to yourself differently about them.
Re-label anxiety as excitement.
Pursuing goals that align with your purpose requires growth. Stress is a natural and inevitable part of growth. A meaningful life is therefore a partly stressful life.
Find meaning in the stress in your life. Write out why the role, relationship, activity, or goal that has associated stress is important to you.
When you do this, small tasks like making your child a packed lunch, dealing with an unnecessarily irate customer, attending an intimidating social event, going for a run on a cold winter morning, or commuting to work stop being mere hassles. They turn into vital steps on your journey to personal transformation.
Think about a recent stressful situation you faced. How might it connect to something deeply meaningful in your life?
Listen to and acknowledge your feelings – anger, sadness, frustration, self-doubt, disappointment. Know that this temporary suffering is part of the human condition. Everyone has experienced something similar to what you’re feeling. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people feeling similar emotions right now.
What would you wish for those people? What would you do to help them? What would it feel like to overcome the suffering?
By expanding your personal suffering to embrace others, you remind yourself that you’re not alone, boosting your oxytocin levels in the process.
That’s an extremely powerful reframe for your wellbeing.
What have you learned about yourself through hardship, loss, or trauma?
While it’s unlikely you’d wish to go through that again, you almost certainly grew in some way:
Stress is part of a meaningful life. It is a myth that the stress response is redundant in modern life.
“If you think that the body’s response to stress is always fight-or-flight, then the stress response begins to look like evolutionary baggage. This is what many scientists argue,”
Dr. Kelly McGonigal.
Not all stress is created equal. Chronic, unrelenting stress without recovery periods or traumatic stress can have negative health impacts. The distinction matters – learning to work with “good stress” while managing unhealthy stressors is key to thriving in today’s world.
Your stress response isn’t something to avoid. For the vast majority of time, it’s part of your innate biology to be embraced and cherished.
People have been searching for an elixir to prolong their lives for millennia. Trusting your stress response might be the only remedy that science has endorsed.
If you’re curious about how to reduce anxiety and use stress as a tool for growth, my workshops in Edinburgh are a great place to start.
These sessions combine science-backed insights with practical techniques to help you reframe stress, regulate your nervous system, and build real-world resilience—whether you’re dealing with burnout, performance pressure, or everyday overwhelm.
—a life of freedom, fulfillment, and limitless potential.
