Listen to the AI-generated audio version of this article. (Beta)
It’s just past one, and you’re awake. Nothing has happened, no one is at the door, tomorrow will be a day like any other. And yet your body lies there as if something were coming. The heart runs too fast, the shoulders are drawn up though there’s nothing to carry. The thoughts circle through the day behind you and the one ahead. Your alarm system is running at operating temperature, for a danger that isn’t there.
This is what we call stress, and most of us have only one answer to it, without ever having chosen it: this is harmful, it has to go. Whether that assumption even holds is what a team led by the health scientist Abiola Keller tested over eight years on nearly thirty thousand people, with a bleak question in the background: which of them would die sooner over that span? At the start, everyone had been asked two things. How much stress did you have in the past year? And do you believe that stress is harming your health?
The result was clear and surprising at once. A lot of stress raised the risk of dying early by forty-three percent, but only among those who were also convinced the stress was making them ill. Those who reported just as much stress but didn’t consider it harmful carried no elevated risk. The belief that one’s own stress makes one ill did something the stress alone did not.
It’s an uncomfortable finding, because it’s aimed straight at you. What do you actually believe while your heart beats faster before a meeting? For most of us the answer, without our ever having chosen it, runs: this is bad for me, I should calm down. And that very thought is suspected of being part of the problem itself.
The Story You Tell Your Racing Heart
The psychologist Alia Crum has shown how much this appraisal plays a part. In her studies, people watched short films that presented stress to one group as something that cripples and weakens, and to the other as something that sharpens and makes you grow. That framing alone changed how their bodies later responded to a real strain, down to the stress hormones in the blood. Those who understood stress as a helpful mobilisation showed a more balanced hormone profile and were more inclined to seek feedback on their performance than to avoid it.
It gets more concrete with Jeremy Jamieson. He took people aside before a stressful task and reinterpreted the pounding heart and quicker breath for them. These reactions, he explained, are the body sending blood and oxygen where they’re about to be needed, equipment for the moment and not a herald of failure. The participants prepared this way didn’t just perform better. Their blood vessels stayed measurably more relaxed and the heart worked more efficiently, a state closer to anticipation than to threat. The same arousal, a different text about it, and to some extent the physiology follows the text.
This finding just shouldn’t be stretched too far, and the popular version does exactly that. Keller’s numbers show a link, not a proof. Perhaps the unworried people were more resilient to begin with, because they had already found more than once that they come through a hard stretch, and so read their tension as a passing signal rather than a threat. In that case the same hard-won calm would be keeping them healthier and giving the relaxed answer at the same time. Whether the thought really protects or merely marks out who was sturdier anyway, this one study can’t say. Either way the pattern points the same direction: what happens to you depends less on the amount of stress than on your relationship to it.
Reading the tension differently helps above all in the short moment, before the talk or the call you dread, if less powerfully than the popular story promises. What’s meant is ordinary tension, not panic or real overload, which need their own ways through. The stress that weighs on you over time is of another kind, the kind that never ebbs away.
The Zebra Goes Back to Grazing
Why this lasting stress arises at all is captured by an image the biologist Robert Sapolsky coined. A zebra that has just fled a lion is grazing again two minutes later as if nothing had happened. Its alarm system switches on when needed and afterwards switches fully off again. In humans it stays on. We carry the tension to the dinner table and into bed, often for dangers that never physically arrive and that you can neither run from nor fight.
Here sits the second lever, overlooked as much as the first. The work psychologist Sabine Sonnentag has spent years studying what best predicts exhaustion. It’s less the amount of work than whether someone genuinely switches off mentally after hours. Whoever stays in their head with the open emails all evening never lets their stress system come all the way down, even when the body has long been on the sofa. Sonnentag’s term for it is psychological detachment, and in her data it protects wellbeing even when the load is high.
The tricky part is that unbroken tension comes to feel normal over time. You no longer notice the alarm is running, because it never went off. That is exactly where the difference lies between short strain and lasting strain. The short kind rises and falls again. The lasting kind finds no end.
Two Dials
Set the two findings side by side, and a different picture of stress emerges. It isn’t a substance that piles up in the body and slowly poisons it. It’s a response built to ramp up and come back down. What becomes of it depends less on its amount than on how you handle it.
That makes for a simple sequence. First, to notice the stress at all, instead of hauling it around as a vague standing condition. Then, when the tension flares, to read it as what it is, an activation that lends you strength for the moment. And to take it seriously enough to see that it powers down again, before it turns into a permanent state. The reading shifts the single moment a little. The powering-down decides whether your system stays healthy over the long run. And where a strain genuinely makes you ill, neither helps much; then the strain itself has to change.
An exercise for the coming week: Ramping Up, Coming Down
Over the next few days, set out to catch two moments, one during the day and one in the evening. The first is the one where your body ramps up, before a meeting or a call you keep putting off. Notice what you automatically tell yourself about the tension, and lay a second reading beside it. The faster heart, the alert body, that’s the activation your system is handing you for this exact moment. In this form stress is nothing bad, it makes you able to act, and you don’t have to get rid of it to cope.
The second moment is after work. Pause for a bit and go through your body. Are the shoulders still raised, the breath shallow? Are your thoughts still circling the day though it’s over? Then the activation is still running after it has long served its purpose, and this is exactly where useful stress turns into the harmful kind. Do something that powers it down, a walk in the open air or a clear cut between work and evening. The activation is allowed to come. It just needs to go again once there’s nothing left to handle.
And once the reason is gone, does the tension go too, or does it keep running?
Sources
- Keller, A., Litzelman, K., Wisk, L. E., Maddox, T., Cheng, E. R., Creswell, P. D. & Witt, W. P. (2012). Does the Perception That Stress Affects Health Matter? The Association With Health and Mortality. Health Psychology, 31(5), 677–684.
- Crum, A. J., Salovey, P. & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716–733.
- Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K. & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind Over Matter: Reappraising Arousal Improves Cardiovascular and Cognitive Responses to Stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422.
- Bosshard, M. & Gomez, P. (2024). Effectiveness of Stress Arousal Reappraisal and Stress-Is-Enhancing Mindset Interventions on Task Performance Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Scientific Reports, 14, 7923.
- Sonnentag, S. & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from Job Stress: The Stressor-Detachment Model as an Integrative Framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103.
- Sonnentag, S., Binnewies, C. & Mojza, E. J. (2010). Staying Well and Engaged When Demands Are High: The Role of Psychological Detachment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 965–976.
- Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (3. Aufl.). Holt.
