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 typical.

when things in your life are difficult.

Almost in the way that if you were running an ultra marathon, you get tired and your body and brain work very hard to convince you to slow down and take a break because it's in your best interest.

That's one theory.

Another theory, which I find very plausible,

is that depression is the equivalent of what you see in animals called the defeat response.

And this is if you are an animal in the wild and you experience so much rejection from your community, your family, your group.

So you've been ostracized.

You have very little access to resources on your own.

You can't find a way to survive on your own.

you will see these changes happen in the brain and body that they're called the defeat response.

But it's this biological cascade that basically convinces animals to crawl away and die, to give up on life.

And so if you stress out a rat enough by, say, putting them in a cage with a bunch of rats that bully that rat incessantly, and the rat can do nothing to escape,

and you're not giving it resources, and it's got no purpose in life, you will see changes in that rat's brain and biology that then if you throw the rat in a bucket of water, it doesn't even try to swim.

It just gives up and drowns.

So I think that a lot of what we experience as depression and why depression is an epidemic in so many cultures right now, so many societies, is that

a lot of people are experiencing kind of the equivalent of being in a cage and being bullied and not being clear about what can I do to improve my circumstances?

Who cares about me?

Who can I, how can I contribute to the world?

And I'm not saying it's necessarily true.

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