Kelly McGonigal

speaker

787 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Kelly McGonigal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The School of Greatness · The Real Reason Stress Is Hurting You | Kelly McGonigal · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah.

So I do try to avoid the language of like, if you think about stress the wrong way, it will kill you.

In part because I actually came to regret that I had done a lot of teaching and speaking and writing about how stress itself can kill you.

So because I'm a health psychologist, I was trained to view stress as the enemy.

And if you look at the science, you can find evidence that stress increases your risk of everything people don't want from heart disease to depression, all of it.

But almost 10 years ago, I came across this study that made me really rethink stress.

And it was a study that tracked about 30,000 adults for almost a decade in the U.S.

And at the beginning of the study, they asked people first, how stressful is your life?

And then also, do you believe that your stress is harmful?

Do you believe that stress is bad for your health?

And so they followed them to find out, like, is it true that stress kills?

And what they found is that for the subset of people who had a very stressful life and most strongly believed that their stress was harmful,

they had a 43% increased risk of dying from any cause over the next decade.

But the people who had the most stressful lives and did not strongly believe that stress was bad for them, they were the most likely to be alive at the end of the decade.

And this study caught my attention because

First of all, it suggests that stress is not always the enemy.

At least it's not always a risk factor in the way that we think about it.

But then also it was making me think like, how many of those deaths was I personally responsible for by going out there trying to convince people that stress was bad for their health and that the stress will kill your brain cells and eventually kill you?

So that was kind of like a wake up moment for me to start to want to investigate, is it possible that how you think about stress can interact with stress?

to help you avoid some of the consequences we don't want.

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