Is Stress Really Bad for You? A Psychologist Says How You Think About It May Matter

For years, the message about stress has been remarkably consistent: reduce it, manage it, avoid it whenever possible.

Health psychologist and Stanford lecturer Kelly McGonigal used to teach much the same thing.

Then she encountered research that changed how she thought about stress—and eventually how she taught others to think about it.

The surprising idea wasn’t that people should seek out stressful lives or pretend difficult experiences are positive. It was that the way we interpret stress may influence how we experience it—and how we respond when life gets difficult.

“Stress is what happens in my mind and body when something that I care about is at stake,” McGonigal told Maria Menounos.

Instead of automatically viewing a racing heart, anxiety or tension as evidence that something is wrong, McGonigal argues that stress can sometimes be understood as something much more human:

A sign that you care.

The Study That Changed How McGonigal Thought About Stress

McGonigal had been trained as a health psychologist to view stress as an enemy of good health.

“If you want to be happy and healthy, you have to avoid stress,” she recalled of the prevailing message.

Then, in 2011, while teaching a course on the science of stress at Stanford, she encountered a study following roughly 30,000 American adults.

Participants were asked how much stress they’d experienced and whether they believed stress was harmful to their health. Researchers then followed them over time.

According to McGonigal, people who reported high levels of stress and strongly believed stress was harmful had a higher risk of dying during the follow-up period.

But those reporting high stress who didn’t strongly hold that belief didn’t show the same pattern.

McGonigal was careful about what could—and couldn’t—be concluded from that kind of research.

“You can’t necessarily say for sure what the study proves is that if you think stress is bad for you, then you’re more likely to die,” she said.

What caught her attention was the possibility that stress mindset—how people understand and interpret stress—might matter alongside the amount of stress they experience.

That realization sent her in a different direction.

Rather than asking only, How do I eliminate stress?, she became interested in another question:

Can we become better at experiencing it?

Stress Often Shows Up Around What Matters Most

Think about the things that cause the most stress in your life.

Your children.

Your parents’ health.

Your career.

Your relationship.

Your own health.

Your future.

There’s a reason a broken toaster probably doesn’t produce the same emotional response as a frightening call from someone you love.

“You don’t have a stress response to something that you don’t care about,” McGonigal said.

She points to research connecting meaningful lives with higher reported levels of stress. People with important relationships, meaningful roles and goals they deeply care about have more things that can potentially be at stake.

That doesn’t make every form of stress desirable.

McGonigal specifically distinguishes meaningful stress from situations such as toxic workplaces or becoming consumed by relatively minor irritations.

Sometimes stress isn’t telling you to tolerate more.

Sometimes, she says, it may be telling you: This isn’t acceptable. Something needs to change.

Being “good at stress,” in other words, doesn’t mean becoming so resilient that you’ll endure anything.

It means getting better at listening to what the stress may be signaling.

A Racing Heart Doesn’t Necessarily Mean You Can’t Handle the Moment

Imagine you’re about to have an important conversation.

Your heart starts pounding.

Your stomach churns.

Your muscles tense.

You feel anxious.

One interpretation is immediate:

I can’t handle this.

I’m falling apart.

Something is wrong.

McGonigal argues that interpretation can become part of the stress experience itself.

But what happens if the response becomes:

I’m anxious because this matters to me.

My heart is pounding because my heart is in it.

Now the physical sensations haven’t magically disappeared. The conversation hasn’t become less important.

What has changed is the meaning you’ve assigned to what you’re feeling.

McGonigal says research into stress mindset suggests that viewing those sensations as something the body is doing to help meet a challenge can change the way people respond.

“By telling yourself it’s okay that I’m anxious, you’re creating a whole different framework for understanding the experience you’re having,” she said.

The goal isn’t to convince yourself that nothing is wrong.

It’s to stop automatically treating the experience of being stressed as another threat.

Maria Tried to Make Her Anxiety Disappear—and Couldn’t

Maria described an experience that showed how difficult that can be.

She had recently gone for acupuncture and initially felt deeply relaxed. The aromatherapy started. The needles went in. The practitioner left the room.

Then, suddenly, a powerful wave of anxiety hit.

Maria tried talking herself out of it.

All is well.

Everything’s fine.

Nothing worked.

McGonigal’s first suggestion was counterintuitive:

Stop making “getting rid of it” the immediate goal.

She pointed out that people sometimes experience strong emotions precisely when they finally become quiet enough to feel them.

Someone goes to yoga expecting relaxation and becomes overwhelmed by grief.

Someone sits down to meditate and suddenly can’t stop thinking about something they’ve been avoiding.

Instead of assuming the practice failed, McGonigal suggests making room for the possibility that difficult feelings can surface when we finally feel safe or supported enough to notice them.

She also cautioned against what she described as effectively “gaslighting yourself” by insisting everything is fine when you’re genuinely experiencing fear, grief or anxiety.

Sometimes life isn’t fine.

The challenge is learning how to meet that reality without adding another layer of fear about the feelings themselves.

What Can You Do When Stress Becomes Overwhelming?

For McGonigal, one answer is finding something that serves as a reliable resource.

For her, it’s breathing.

Years of yoga and meditation have given her a relationship with the breath that feels grounding and centering.

Someone else’s resource might be prayer, thinking about a loved one or another practice that reconnects them with something meaningful.

She also uses a more surprising strategy when she feels overwhelmed: thinking about other people experiencing something similar.

If she’s awake at night worrying, she may think about all the other people lying awake with uncertainty about their health or someone they love.

Rather than making her feel worse, she says it reminds her that the experience connects her to something universal.

She then imagines breathing out compassion, strength and hope toward those people.

For McGonigal, the practice works partly because compassion is consistent with the person she wants to be when life gets difficult.

That’s a recurring theme in her approach to stress:

When you can’t control the situation, you can still choose who you want to be inside it.

Chronic Pain Taught Her That Life Doesn’t Have to Wait

McGonigal’s perspective isn’t purely academic.

She told Maria that she has experienced chronic pain since childhood and also has tendencies toward anxiety, depression and despair.

For years, chronic pain created a tempting bargain:

Life will really begin once I get rid of this.

Eventually, McGonigal says she had to let go of the assumption that the problem had to completely disappear before she could fully live.

“My life doesn’t have to wait for this problem to go away,” she said.

That meant learning that pain and gratitude could exist simultaneously.

Pain and enthusiasm.

Pain and meaning.

They didn’t cancel each other out.

Ironically, McGonigal realized she’d learned that lesson about chronic pain long before she was willing to apply it to stress.

She had made room for pain but still believed stress was inherently toxic and had to be eliminated.

Her research eventually challenged that assumption too.

Invisible Pain Can Become a Source of Empathy

Living with chronic pain also gave McGonigal another insight.

People often couldn’t see that she was hurting.

Someone could look at her and have no idea what she was carrying physically.

That taught her something she now brings into rooms full of other people:

You don’t know what someone else is carrying either.

Someone may be grieving.

Another person may be struggling with addiction.

Someone else may be in pain.

And none of it may be visible.

McGonigal says that awareness has become a source of empathy and meaning for her.

The pain itself isn’t something she celebrates. She has made lifestyle changes that she says have helped reduce it.

But the experience taught her to recognize that suffering can exist beneath an apparently normal exterior.

Willpower Isn’t About Forcing Yourself

McGonigal’s work also challenges another familiar wellness concept: willpower.

Most people think of willpower as forcing themselves to do something they don’t want to do—or denying themselves something they desperately want.

McGonigal defines it differently.

Willpower, she says, is making choices consistent with your highest goals and values even when those choices are difficult.

Every morning, for example, she gets up to exercise.

And every morning, part of her doesn’t want to.

The resistance doesn’t mean the goal isn’t authentic.

That’s important because we often assume that if we truly wanted something, doing it would feel easy.

McGonigal says competing desires are normal.

Part of you wants to exercise.

Part wants to stay in bed.

Part wants to be present with your children.

Part wants to check the notification that just appeared on your phone.

Willpower isn’t eliminating those competing voices.

It’s remembering which one reflects what matters most to you.

Before Working on Willpower, Figure Out Your “Want Power”

McGonigal divides willpower into three parts.

There’s the familiar “won’t power”—not doing something that conflicts with your goals.

There’s “will power”—taking action on something important even when it’s difficult.

But she says the place to begin is “want power.”

What do you actually want?

Why does it matter?

What kind of person do you want to become?

If those answers aren’t clear, it’s easy to operate on autopilot: do what’s easiest, repeat old habits or follow what other people tell you to do.

If you want to stop vaping, become more present with your children or exercise regularly, McGonigal suggests going underneath the behavior.

Why does the change matter to you?

Not because someone will judge you if you don’t do it.

Not because you’re “supposed” to.

What’s the real aspiration?

Knowing that won’t make every difficult choice suddenly easy.

But McGonigal says it makes you more likely to recognize those moments when your values are asking you to choose differently.

Even Three Minutes of Movement Can Change How You Feel

Movement is one of McGonigal’s own most reliable tools.

She told Maria that going from inactivity to even a few minutes of movement can increase energy and optimism, in part through changes involving adrenaline and dopamine.

And she emphasized movement, not a particular type of exercise.

Walking.

Dancing.

Swimming.

Yoga.

Whatever form of movement your body can do.

Maria immediately thought about her mother, who was dealing with brain cancer and had become increasingly limited physically.

Instead of framing exercise as an intimidating workout, Maria realized she could encourage her mother to simply move whatever she could.

A few curls.

A little movement.

Something.

McGonigal’s message was that movement can be adapted to the body and circumstances you actually have.

What If Exercise Isn’t About Fixing Your Body?

That idea became the basis of McGonigal’s book The Joy of Movement.

After teaching group exercise for decades, she became interested in what movement can offer beyond calories burned or appearance.

Her argument is that exercise can be a way of experiencing connection, mastery, inner strength, celebration and hope.

She described seeing those possibilities in very different settings: dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease, boxing for people with physical disabilities and running as a way of navigating grief.

The point isn’t that everyone needs to become a runner or join a gym.

It’s almost the opposite.

Find the movement available to you.

Maria began thinking of the body itself as a resource rather than simply something that needs to be improved.

McGonigal offered an image that made that idea particularly vivid: she described muscles as being almost like a “pharmacy,” releasing signaling molecules during physical activity that communicate with the brain and other parts of the body.

For Maria, that reframed exercise yet again.

It wasn’t just about being thin.

It wasn’t even only about being physically healthy.

Movement could be something she deliberately used to support how she felt.

Stress Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy

None of McGonigal’s message is that stress is always good.

A toxic workplace can still be toxic. Overwhelm is still real. Anxiety can still be deeply uncomfortable. Chronic stressors can demand real changes.

Nor is the message that positive thinking magically fixes difficult circumstances.

McGonigal explicitly rejects that interpretation.

Instead, her argument is about what happens after stress arrives.

Do you immediately see it as proof that you’re failing?

Do you become frightened by your own racing heart?

Do you assume you shouldn’t be feeling what you’re feeling?

Or can you pause long enough to ask what the stress is connected to?

Maybe you’re worried because you love someone.

Anxious because the conversation matters.

Overwhelmed because something in your life needs to change.

Or frightened because you’re facing something genuinely difficult.

The stress itself doesn’t solve any of those problems.

But treating it as information rather than automatically viewing it as an enemy may change what you do next.

As McGonigal put it:

Stress is not necessarily a sign that you’re ill-equipped to handle your life. Sometimes it’s a sign that you care.