How to Make Stress to be Your Friend--Wendi Fan

Kelly McGonigal, who is a psychologist of Stanford University, has participated in putting the new researches into practice, which including psychology, neurology and medical, to help us to solve the problems in our daily life. In the presentation, McGonigal told us that making friends with stress could help us to live in healthy and positive status to avoid being defeated. She stated two main studies to prove that whether the stress influenced you or not, it depended on your attitude to it.

The first and foremost research is that most people will experience heat pounding, breathing faster and sweating soon if you are attending a study. These express that you are nervous in the pressure, and you don't deal with it very well. Maybe this feeling is harm for you, but at the same time, it would be different if you seem these as signs that your body was getting ready for next action. A trial was held in Harvard University to prove that when persons who intended to join the test were told some details in advanced, their reflects to the stress were helpful. Moreover, the heart beating is good for the next step; the breathing faster makes you to get more oxygen. Last, the participants get more confident and more optimistic by knowing the stress performance.

The second study is about two questions that:" How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" and "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" In this research, there are one thousand persons at the age between 34 and 93 to answer these two questions, and in the following five years, death records among them were in paper. From the results, we can see the person live in major stresses such economic problems or marriage crisis hold 30% of the risk of dying. However, people who took time in helping others showed none of the risk of dying from stress. Caring makes long life. It is so important to study how to transfer the stress. When you choose to face it positively, you will gain more courages; If you choose to communicate with others, you will make resilient life.