Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness in today's session, we're going to talk about transforming your stress into power. I'd like to start by sharing some of the research by Dr. Kelly McGonigal. In her book, The Upside of Stress, she cites a study where they tracked 30,000 adults in the United States over the course of eight years. And at the beginning of the study, they asked them how much stress do you experience and do you think stress is harmful for you? After the study, what they found is those who experience a lot of stress were 43% more likely to die.

But they were only more likely to die if they thought that stress was harmful for them. For those who experienced a lot of stress, but didn't see it as harmful, they were not impacted. So that's really interesting. And it has been a, an interesting new piece of research in the literature around stress, because what it shows is that it's not necessarily the stress itself, but rather our mindset around stress that can determine how harmful it is for our health and wellbeing. Now, I don't think we should immediately take this to it, the the fullest extent.

And I go, okay, bring on all the stress because I think stress is positive. I mean, you have to work within your limits and there still is a lot of research to show that overwhelming amounts of stress can be negative for us. So we take this with a grain of salt. But I think it's really interesting for us to start by looking at what is our relationship to stress. When we do experience stress in a moment.

Are we going, Oh, here we go again. I know stress is bad for me. This is hurting me. I'm, I'm ruining my health. I'm going to have a bad day because of this.

Or even start beating ourselves up about it, like what's wrong with me for experiencing stress. Nobody else seems to be struggling this much. Even just that language of struggle, what would it be like to shift to that into something like, Oh, you know, this is my body energizing me for the moment, or this is my mind responding to a situation that could potentially be harmful or something that I should pay attention to. All of these chemicals moving throughout my body, this experience of stress is is preparing me to take on the moment, to be at my best, to be a little bit more sharp, energized, focused. Now, if this stressful experience is already going to be there, whether we take a negative relationship to it or a positive relationship to it, right? It's, it's all just the meaning we're placing on it.

So we might as well apply a meaning and a perception that is serving us in a more positive way. So my invitation to you today is as you're going about your day and you experience a moment of stress, if your default response is one of, uh, it being negative and it being something that's hurtful, try taking on the perspective as of maybe this is something that's positive and how might it be serving you in a purposeful, intentional way. Try that out. Have some fun with it. And as you do this, you start to take this experience that we typically see is pulling us down, we harness it and you can use it as a source of power in your own life.

Thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you soon and until next time, take care.