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

It's the uncertainty.

It's,

uh what we actually mean when we say we're stressed it's all of that so i you know forget good stress bad stress because it sets us up to think that if we're experiencing what all of us will instinctively say didn't want this like the bad stress um that's that's the real stress for most of us and again most of us don't get to choose how stressful our lives are how stressful the world is i mean this the time we're living in now is a perfect example of that and if you label things good stress bad stress it can lead to things like

Believing and let's say you're trying to homeschool your kids right now.

And it's enormously stressful and you're feeling like a bad parent and a bad teacher and you can't figure out how you're going to get through today, let alone tomorrow.

You're if you believe that bad stress, you're going to believe I'm not cut out to be a parent.

There's something wrong with my kids.

There's something wrong with my life and I just like let's

no here's the here's the distinction that i like to make life can be difficult so that good or bad but stress is what arises in you when something that you care about is at stake so it's your thoughts it's your emotions it's your biology it's the stress hormones it's the adrenaline it's your desire to reach out to others it's sometimes a sense of outrage and anger it's all the stuff that emerges to help you meet a moment that matters

And so what I like to focus on is in moments of stress, some of those instincts are going to be healthy and helpful and others are not.

So rather than like stress being good or bad, it's about learning more about your stress responses, the repertoire that's available to you, and how do you get good at stress so that you can tell in a moment of stress, is this a moment that requires slowing down and going within, or is this a moment that requires being vulnerable

and asking for help?

Is this a moment that requires ignoring everything else and rising to the challenge because it's an emergency and I need that adrenaline to let to do it?

There's a lot of different ways to be good at stress.

And that's the good that I like to focus on.

There are a lot of examples that I can go into, but I want to start from an overview.

This is where that improv idea of yes and can be really helpful.

I know you've talked with other guests about this too.

Sometimes there's a tendency to want to be so positive that we ignore reality.

One of the reasons that I'm drawn to the research that I do and the topics that I talk about is because it is not in my nature to be positive.

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