Dr. Alia Crum

Because public health officials think, well, if I just tell people you need to get more exercise because it's good for you, they'll do it.

We know now that that doesn't work, that these guidelines are not motivational.

They don't change our behavior.

And what our work adds to that is that not only is it not motivational, it also creates potentially a mindset that...

you know, makes people worse off than they were without knowing about the guidelines.

Great.

Yeah.

So I had, you know, I'd come off the heels of doing some research in exercise and diet.

The obvious next thing to think about was stress.

Right.

The public health message was very clear.

Right.

That stress was bad.

Right.

Unmitigated and harmful.

Right.

on our health, our productivity, our relationships, our fertility, our cognition, you name it, right?

The messages that were out there, by and large, oversimplified messages focused on the damaging consequences of stress.

But as you know, if you actually dive deeper into the literature on stress and the origins of stress, what you find is that, you know, the literature, like most literature, is not so clear cut.

And in fact, there's a large amount of evidence to support the fact that the experience of stress, meaning encountering adversity or challenge in one's goal related efforts, uh,