How to Make Stress Your Friend? - Kelly McGonigal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU

I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand, if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone? How about a moderate amount of stress? Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too. But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. 

For years, I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. 

Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked thirty thousand adults in the United States for 8 years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?". They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used puplic death records to find out who died. Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a forty three percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relative little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the 8 years they were tracking deaths, one hundred and eighty two thousand Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. That is over twenty thousand deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AISD and homicide.       

- relatively (adv): khá, tương đối
- moderate (adj): vừa phải, phải chăng, có mức độ
- cardiovascular (adj) /ˌkɑːrdioʊˈvæskjələr/: thuộc, liên quan tới tim và các mạch máu
- enemy (n) /ˈenəmi/: kẻ thù, kẻ địch, địch thủ; quân địch, tàu địch
- rethink (v) /ˌriːˈθɪŋk/: nghĩ lại 
- approach (n): cách tiếp cận 

- prematurely (adv) /priːməˈtʃʊrly/: sớm, yếu, non 

- belief (n) /bɪˈliːf/  lòng tin, đức tin; sự tin tưởng