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

So here's how I would put it.

First of all, there's interesting research that adverse life experiences and trauma can change your biology in ways that are

helpful if you stay in that environment.

So things like increasing inflammation, changing your brain in ways that help you detect threat, that if you stay in an unsafe environment, these are really helpful changes in your brain and in your body to keep you alive.

So it's not like you're broken.

But if you're no longer in that environment, it can take a while for your brain and body to catch up.

And so you can end up being at increased risk for things like heart disease or depression.

because of the long-term toll of some of those changes in your brain and in your body.

The reason that stress and trauma have these negative consequences is that we learn from experience.

And trauma is a big experience that basically opens your capacity to be changed by life's experiences.

So we're biologically primed.

to be changed by life.

Your brain and body are always waiting to be changed by experiences.

And trauma is a big one.

It basically opens up this window of plasticity.

And a lot of times we get changed in ways that we end up not loving.

Like PTSD is a perfect example of your brain and body learning from experience, learning a lot of useful things, but it doesn't feel useful when you're being triggered by sounds or you can't sleep at night or you feel like nobody understands what you've been through.

It doesn't feel useful, although technically your brain and body are trying to protect you, particularly if you're still in an environment that caused the initial trauma.

So the thing that I like to focus on

it's not that like trauma can be good for you, but that our ability to be changed by life's experiences can be good for you.

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