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 TED 如何讓壓力成為你的朋友 - 英文(3)

演講者： 凱莉·麥高尼格 (健康心理學家)

Now, if you were actually in this study, you had probably be a little stressed out.

Your heart might be pounding, you might breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat.

And normally, we interpret these physical change as anxiety or signs that we are not coping very well with the pressure.

But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge?

Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University.

Before they went through the social stress lest, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful.

That pounding heart is preparing you for action.

If you are breathing faster, it is no problem.

It is getting more oxygen to your brain.

And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.

Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this.

And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease.

It is not really healthy to be in this state all the time.

But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this.

Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile.

It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.

Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s.

And this really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about strss matters.

So my goal as a health psychologist has changed I no longer want to get rid of your stress.

I want to make you better at stress.

And we just did a little intervention.

If you raised your hand and said you had had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you are going to remember this talk and you are going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge.