Dr. Alia Crum

Your motivation is to, well, first you get worried about the stress, right?

And second is your reaction is typically to do one of two things.

It's either to freak out and do everything you can to make sure that this doesn't affect you negatively or to check out.

And say, oh, it's not a big deal.

I'm not going to deal with it.

You know, you're basically in denial.

So people who have a stress is debilitating mindset, and we've shown this in our research, tend to go to one or the other of those extremes.

They freak out or they check out.

Why?

Because if stress is bad, you need to either...

get rid of it and deal with it or it needs to not exist, right?

If you have a stress-enhancing mindset, the motivation changes, right?

Then the motivation is how do I utilize the stress to realize the enhancing outcomes?

What can we do here, right, to learn from this experience to make us stronger, fitter, you know, have better science and treatments for the future, right?

deepen my relationships with others, improve my priorities and so forth.

So the motivation changes.

The affect around it changes.

It doesn't make it easy to deal with.

But what we've shown in our research is that people who have a stress-enhancing mindset have more positive affect, not necessarily less negative affect.

And it potentially changes physiology.