Earlier this week, my boss asked me to work on a 'Stress Management' training session. Someone on the team had created it, but it covered basics, and my boss wanted to elevate it. I started looking for interesting source material, and came upon a fascinating study.
This was done in the US. They surveyed a broad group of people. I'm paraphrasing here, but the gist is that they asked "how much stress did you have in the last year?" They also asked "How much did stress impact your health?" Then, they followed the people and watched death records for the next ~5 years.
What they found was fascinating! The people who said they had a lot of stress and that stress impacted their health were much more likely to have died over the course of the study period. The people who said they had a lot of stress, but that didn't report it impacting their health had no increased risk of death. The study's authors attributed over 20,000 US deaths a year simply to the personal belief that one's life was very stressful and that stress impacted one's health. In other words, 20,000 deaths a year because of mindset alone.
Now, I really don't believe you can kill yourself with your mind, so I take this study with a grain of salt! I certainly could see that those who think their health is impacted by high stress might feel too overwhelmed to adopt effective coping strategies. I guess the moral of the story that I take away is that it can't hurt to take steps to help mitigate how I think stress impacts me. I like the study as a reminder to keep up my coping strategies, and to hold firm in my belief that those coping strategies overcome the impact of stress.
On that note, I'm off to cope via a cookie! :)
I agree. There’s a lot of research on chronic stress and how it negatively impacts health and life span. Problem is, the solutions to “just relax” don’t work. Lifestyle changes are often required
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