4 Things We Get Wrong About Stress, According To A Psychologist

For Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., there's something off about the way we talk and think about stress: It's too one-dimensional and oftentimes too negative. The more negative impacts of stress aren't news to us, but is there an upside to stress?

When she sat down with mindbodygreen co-CEO Jason Wachob on an episode of the mindbodygreen podcast, they were sure to talk about just that. It turns out there are a few things we get wrong about this common feeling, and McGonigal thinks stress may actually need something of a rebrand.

McGonigal acknowledges that stress isn't always good and that it can interfere with our ability to be our best self, but simply considering stress to be all bad is looking at it too simply and neglecting the fact that stress is a big part of what makes us human. According to her, these are four of the biggest things we get wrong about stress:

We have a tendency to assume stress inherently means there's something bad about how our life or our choices have gone, but that's not the truth. "People have this fantasy that if they could just get life right, they could have everything they want and none of the stress," said McGonigal.

The truth of the matter is that without stress, life wouldn't be the same: The man who coined the term, Hans Seyle, actually defined the absence of stress as death—so maybe we should stop dreaming about being stress-free and instead dream of managing stress.