"How to Make Stress Your Friend", Ted Talk of Kelly McGonigal, PhD from Stanford, health psychologist, lecturer, author, instructor of psychology at Stanford University.
In this lecture Kelly apologizes to her public for previously giving stress a bad rap. Now, according to a study completed by Harvard University, stress is a good thing if you run along with its benefits. In the presence of stress the heart will pound: that is a given. But then, it is attitude from there. If you have a negative attitude toward this heart pounding and the cause of stress, your blood vessels will constrict and that is where all the health problems, including high risk for death, start because your blood vessels are jammed up and will not allow the proper flow of blood. But those who take stress as a positive challenge do not experience this constriction of blood vessels and therefore stress is not a contributor to ill health.
In fact, McGonigal points out, stress produces a focus and feeling of well being by releasing the "cuddle hormone" oxytocin, that makes you want to go out and communicate with others or do something good for others. I imagine we are talking about the foxhole mentality where there are no barriers to communication on the front line of a war.
At the end of her lecture she was asked if we should avoid taking a job that is stressfull or not and she said to go ahead and take the stressful job. She said to look at life this way,"Chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort....trust yourself to handle the stress that follows."
Books:
- The Willpower Instrinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of it. (2012)
- The Neuroscience of Change: A Compassion-Based Program for Personal Transformation (2012)
- Yoga for Pain Relief: Simple Practices to Calm Your Mind and Heal Your Chronic Pain (2009)
View more of her
- kellymcgonigal.com
- see many lectures and interviews with Ms. McGonigal on You Tube
Commentary:
Her work is science based and while science is a good intellectual platform for personal change, transformation never actually takes place on the intellectual level; it occurs on the wisdom, intuitive, and action level. So her work is a good starting point and sometimes you need to hear "the research" to tell you why positive thinking is important because if the intellect is not satisfied, it can become a bitter foe.
-Enjoy the Ride!
Byron Katie
A friend of mine recommended a You Tube video of this gentle, gracious and laser-focused, no hype teacher who shares her guided commentary to help students unravel tangled mental ghosts and negative thinking from their mind. The idea of Byron Katie Mitchell, who always goes by simply Byron Katie, is that when we harbor resentment or remorse from the past, we end up with a heavy case of the downers. And fears of the future are only crippling. We all realize this on one level or another, but it is hard to get out of the quicksand of our mind when we are standing in the quick sand.
She has developed a way to talk back to the negative thoughts from ourselves and others that unnecessarily and tragically make our life miserable. She takes us through a system that helps us to control our negative thoughts about our experiences and turn them around into something positve; she bases her approach on the idea that life brings us gifts on a constant basis... even when they appear to be negative. We just have to make the right interpretation...and face up to the reality about these situations and attitudes inside us...face up with our own inner truth, not lies we have been allowing ourselves to believe.
She has a set of simple questions that we can ask ourselves and an approach to answering those questions. Amazing. I was watching her on You Tube and felt mentally more genuinely positive just through watching her, although she does have nine day sessions and shorter workshops and lectures around the country. Most of the workshops carry a fee but she occasionally has a one-lecture freeby.
Just log on to You Tube and pull up her name.
You can also go to her web sites
www,byronkatie.com
www.thework.com
Here are a couple of her book titles:
- Question Your Thinking
- I Need Your Love--Is That True?
- A Thousand Names for Joy
I have given her a Kick It Living 10 rating because
her technique is a 10:
very efficient: good personal growth for the amount of energy you expend
her speaking presentation is a 10:
she gets right down to business and doesn't waste your time with marketing of herself and idle chit-chat.
Enjoy the Ride, Homies
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