Hey! Welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. Over the last number of days, we've been exploring lots of different strategies to work with stress, to be in relationship to stress, to redirect our attention away from it, to drop into our bodies. Today, we're going to explore something different. How to transform stress into power? And, I'm pulling some ideas from Kelly McGonigal's work, who teaches at Stanford, wrote the book, The Upside of Stress, because I think some of her researching work is groundbreaking. So one of the studies she talks about is, one that tracked 30 adults in the US, for a, 30,000 adults in the US for eight years.

And they asked those people, how much stress have you experienced in the last year? They also asked, do you believe stress is harmful for your health? Then, they looked at the public death records to see who died eight years later or beyond. Now, people who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased risk of dying, which might not be that surprising. But, that was only true for people who believe that stress was harmful for their health. The people who experienced a lot of stress, but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. The researchers estimated that over those eight years, about 182,000 people in the US died, not from stress, but the belief that stress is bad for you.

Hmm. So notice how that lands for you. For me, the first time I, I heard this, it was radical and I immediately started to assess what is my relationship to stress. I think the message that we're fed from a very early age is that, stress is not good for us. It's killing us.

It's hard a fall. And it's true too, that if we're constantly living in stress and our body is always tense, that is going to have an effect. But when it comes to a lot of the different stressors that, kind of help us achieve our goals or come with just the daily struggles of life, we can shift our relationship to that stress in a way that actually shifts how the stress manifests in our body and whether it leads to health or disease. So my encouragement to you today and over the course of this series and beyond is to explore what actually is your mindset around stress when it arises? Yes, we've worked with making space for it, shifting our attention away from it, dropping it into the body, always to help soften stress. But what would it be like to actually view the stress when it arises as a source of power, to see that this is your body, equipping you, getting you engaged to take on the chair and of the day, to meet the task at hand.

That's a very different perspective than this stress is hurting me or harmful or getting in the way of what I'm trying to do. We want to take a balanced approach because, we don't always want to be in that stressed out state. But I do think there are a lot of circumstances, such as maybe before an athletic event, a talk, or even coming home after a long day of work and navigating needs with our family. To see that stress arise and say, actually, this is serving me to help me meet the challenge at hand, to rise up and to be my best self. So try that out today.

See how that perspective impacts the experience of stress. At least the research shows, it's definitely a much better mindset to take with you. We'll explore some more of this in the meditation. As always, thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you soon and take care.