16 Mar What’s your stress mindset? Do you see it as enhancing or debilitating?
Happiness…most see it as a positive emotion. Which it obviously is.
But happiness is also the management of so-called “negative emotions” such as stress.
And stress…well, it depends on whether you think it’s good for you or bad!
Read on…
via Psychology Today via Sarah-Nicole Bostan
An abundance of literature has pointed toward a clear link between stress and performance. This association is critical for understanding the contextually-dependent nature of testing, diagnosis, and assessment, which can be influenced by such intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Research in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) suggests that cognitive reappraisal, or the ability to change one’s thoughts in the presence of emotionally-charged stimuli, can improve responses to stressful situations such as test-taking. However, this body of work does not adequately address the role of stress mindset, or how one views the nature of stress itself and whether thoughts need to be changed in the first place.
A recent study (Crum, Akinola, Martin, & Fath, 2017) suggests that one’s overall mindset about the nature of stress is related to differential patterns of hormoneproduction, emotional experience, attention biases, and cognitive flexibility. The initial findings of the study were published on January 27 in the journal Anxiety, Stress, & Coping.
Stress mindset is the overarching belief that stress is either enhancing or debilitating for cognitive, psychological, affective, and hormonal outcomes. Individuals who hold a “stress-is-enhancing” mindset see daily life stressors as challenges for which they have adequate resources to meet expected demands. Those who hold a “stress-is-debilitating” mindset see stressors as overwhelming events for which they are lacking internal resources to meet external pressures. Specifically, individuals who endorse stress as a challenge, rather than as a problem, on a measure of stress mindset (Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013) tend to have better health, greater life satisfaction, lower cortisol reactivity (the “stress” hormone), and are more receptive to performance feedback by others…
…keep reading the full and original article HERE