Dr. Alia Crum

But these mindsets can help with the translational process.

Yeah, and that's an important, important nuance in your language, which is people have, by and large, come from a place of how do you manage stress?

How do you cope with it?

Which implies how do you fight against it?

And yeah, the real challenge is how do we leverage it?

How do we utilize it?

How do we work with it?

And I have a lot of thoughts on this.

The first and most important thing is to clarify our definition of stress.

The negative stress mindset is so insidious that now people define stress with its negative consequences.

So the first step is to decouple that and to realize that stress is a neutral, yet to be determined effect of experiencing or anticipating adversity in your goal-related efforts.

So let me unpack that a little more.

You can be in the midst of it, or you could just be worried about something happening.

That's one aspect.

Second is adversity or challenge, so something that's working against you.

But the third piece is critical, and that is in your goal-related efforts.

What that means is that we only stress about things we care about, and we don't stress about things we don't care about.

So then the question becomes, okay, if that's true, how can I better utilize or leverage or respond to the inevitable stresses that we're going to experience?

We've developed a three-step approach to adopting a stress-enhancing mindset.

And briefly, the first step is to just acknowledge that you're stressed.