Stress can make you stronger: the science of the stress-is-enhancing mindset

The Short Version

What you believe about stress changes what stress does to you. Stanford psychologist Alia Crum has shown that people who see stress as enhancing rather than debilitating report better health and performance, and that nine minutes of video over a week was enough to shift bankers' mindsets and reduce their stress symptoms [1]. Kelly McGonigal describes a study of 30,000 adults in which stress was linked to higher mortality only among those who believed it was bad for them [2]. David Yeager's research shows that a short lesson combining a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset with a growth mindset changes teenagers' stress physiology and improves their grades [3][4], and Andrew Huberman describes the body shifting from a threat pattern to a challenge pattern, with shorter cortisol release and better blood flow [4]. The reframe doesn't make hardship good and doesn't protect against chronic, sleep-wrecking stress [1][5], but because it can be learned in minutes it is among the most efficient mindset changes these researchers know of.

Table of contents

What They Said

Alia Crum: stress is a paradox, and your mindset decides which side you get

Alia Crum, a tenured Stanford psychology professor and director of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, defines mindsets as core beliefs about a domain that orient us toward particular expectations, explanations and goals [1]. She argues that they shape not only what we notice and what motivates us, but also what our bodies prioritize and prepare to do [1]. Her milkshake study showed the principle in the body: when people believed they were drinking an indulgent 620-calorie shake, their hunger hormone ghrelin dropped about three times more than when they believed the identical shake was a low-calorie "sensible" one [1]. Her hotel housekeeper study showed it in health: housekeepers told, accurately, that their work counted as exercise lost weight and lowered systolic blood pressure by about ten points within four weeks, with no detectable change in workload or diet [1].

When Crum turned to stress, she found that the public health message treated stress as uniformly harmful, while the research was more mixed [1]. Stress can narrow focus and speed up information processing; stress hormones can recruit growth-promoting anabolic hormones, a process called physiological toughening; and research on post-traumatic growth shows that even severe adversity can deepen people's values, relationships and passion for life [1]. She doesn't claim stress is purely good. Her point is that its true nature is a paradox, and she asks what role mindset plays in which side of that paradox we experience [1].

With Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor she built a scale using statements such as "stress enhances my performance and productivity," and found that an enhancing mindset correlated with better health, well-being and performance [1]. The key test came after the 2008 financial crisis, with UBS employees facing layoffs. Some watched no videos, some watched films framing stress as crushing, and some watched equally factual films framing it as enhancing, including examples like LeBron James making a last-minute free throw [1]. Nine minutes of video over a week shifted mindsets, and the enhancing group reported fewer backaches, less muscle tension, less insomnia and racing heart, and better performance at work [1]. The debilitating videos made no one worse, because that message was already everywhere [1].

Navy SEAL recruits were the one group Crum found whose average already leaned toward stress being enhancing. Within that group, a stronger enhancing mindset at the start of BUD/S training predicted graduating, faster obstacle-course times and better peer ratings [1].

Why it matters. People with a debilitating mindset tend to react in one of two ways: "they freak out or they check out" [1]. An enhancing mindset shifts motivation toward using the stress to learn and grow and brings more positive emotion, though not necessarily less negative emotion; some studies also show more moderate cortisol responses and higher DHEA [1]. Crum warns that checking out can lead to depression and anhedonia, because you also check out from what you care about, and Huberman connects this to substance abuse [1]. She describes mindsets as "kind of a portal between conscious and subconscious processes": a default setting that quietly guides the body but that we can notice and reprogram [1].

Her method. First, redefine stress as neutral: the experience or anticipation of adversity in pursuit of goals that matter to you. "As humans we stress because we care and we don't stress about things we don't care about" [1]. Then follow three steps: acknowledge the stress, welcome it because it points to something you care about, and use the stress response to achieve that goal rather than spending time and energy trying to get rid of it [1]. She also warns against becoming dogmatic about having the right mindset, and advises people to treat yourself like a scientist [1]. Her lab's Rethink Stress toolkit is available at mbl.stanford.edu and through Stanford SPARQ [1].

Her caveat. An enhancing mindset does not mean the stressor itself is good. Combat, a cancer diagnosis or poverty are not good things, but the experience of stress can still lead to growth [1].

Kelly McGonigal: stress is a signal of what you care about

Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, talking with Lewis Howes, starts with the study she says changed the conversation: in a study of 30,000 adults, stress increased the risk of dying only among people who believed stress was bad for them, while people with high stress who saw it as manageable were among the most likely to thrive [2]. Like Crum, she defines stress by what is at stake: it is what arises when something we care about is at stake, and it is neither good nor bad, but a set of physical and emotional responses wired to help us rise to challenges, connect with others and adapt [2].

Her practical focus is interpretation in the moment. Learning to read stress sensations such as a pounding heart or racing thoughts as energy rather than panic, she says, dramatically improves both performance and health [2]. She suggests self-talk such as "My heart is in it" or "I'm here for this," which she says shifts the body's response from fight-or-flight to challenge-and-engage [2]. According to her, these small shifts increase emotional resilience, reduce inflammation, improve problem-solving and promote social connection [2].

McGonigal adds a social dimension. In moments of loneliness, she says, the body sends biological signals not to isolate but to seek connection; recognizing this lets us reach out instead of retreat [2]. Her advice for depression runs along similar lines: exercise, service and caring for an animal, plus compassion meditation as an optional fourth path [2]. She links it to willpower too: naming your values helps trigger the brain's "pause and plan" system under stress [2]. Her overall message is that we don't need to eliminate stress to live well; we need to become more skillful in how we meet it [2].

David Yeager: pair the stress reframe with a growth mindset

University of Texas psychologist David Yeager, a leading growth-mindset researcher, explains to Huberman why the stress reframe became part of his work. Growth mindset, simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change, didn't always address the physical feeling of stress, such as a racing heart or butterflies before an audition; he mentions his 13-year-old daughter before a cello audition [3]. So his team combined growth mindset with Crum's and Jeremy Jamieson's stress research [3].

Crum calls the common belief that arousal is always harmful the "stress is debilitating" mindset, which leads to "being stressed about being stressed" [3]. The alternative is to see the racing heart as your body sending more oxygenated blood to your brain and muscles, and to think "this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance" [3]. Yeager notes that most stress-management advice tells people to distract themselves with a walk or a bubble bath, when someone about to present to a senior vice president should instead get ready to perform [3]. In his team's studies, changing people's mindset about stress actually changes their stress physiology [3].

Stressor, appraisal, response. Yeager draws the psychophysiologists' distinction between the stressor (a demand such as an exam, a hard conversation or a marathon), your appraisal of it, and the stress response [3]. A threat response happens when you judge the demand to be more than you can handle: the body prepares for damage and defeat, keeps blood central and releases cortisol [3]. Most modern stressors are social, such as a ninth grader facing exclusion or a new legal associate whose first brief is torn apart, yet they can trigger the same response [3]. Arousal alone can't tell a good state from a bad one: in Jamieson's example, a strong skier and a terrified novice at the top of a double-black-diamond run both have high arousal, but one is excited and the other expects to crash [3]. Wearable stress trackers can't tell the difference either, he says [3]. The key is not finding the perfect level of difficulty but matching the demand with a belief that you have the resources to meet it, whether confidence, the ability to reappraise, time, training or a friend to turn to. Because the mind appraises those resources, interventions can shift people from threat to challenge [3].

Effort beliefs. Yeager adds a related trap. Many people hold what Carol Dweck calls effort beliefs: the belief that if it's hard it means you're doing the wrong thing [3]. If someone reads effort as a sign of low ability and you tell them to try harder, you are effectively telling them they have no potential [3]. Growth mindset properly understood isn't try hard and you can do anything; it's that under the right conditions with the right support change is possible [3]. He also notes that the belief that you can't change is itself very stressful [3].

Brief interventions. Yeager explains that a short intervention has to persuade people without talking down to them, and deliver the message at a moment when it can start a snowball effect over time [3]. The wise interventions he uses have three parts: new scientific information, stories from people like the participant, and a saying-is-believing exercise in which participants write their own story of struggle and growth [3]. In his 2019 Nature study, two sessions of about 25 minutes raised ninth graders' grades eight or nine months later [3]. But he stresses that effects last only where the environment supports them, such as schools with supportive classroom cultures and advanced courses [3].

Andrew Huberman: the physiology, the combined study and the limits

In a solo episode on growth mindset, Huberman walks through Crum's paper on rethinking stress. One group saw a presentation arguing that stress is harmful and should be avoided; another saw one on how stress improves health and vitality, and both were true [4]. On easy tasks, the stress-is-enhancing group improved slightly and the other group didn't change. On hard tasks, only those who learned that stress can enhance performance improved significantly, without any extra practice [4]. He stresses that this is not a placebo effect and does not involve lying [4].

Huberman explains that the stress response evolved to mobilize us toward challenges of all kinds, not just away from predators [4]. Adopting a stress-is-enhancing mindset, he says, produces measurable shifts: shorter cortisol release, greater cardiac stroke volume, more peripheral blood flow and clearer thinking under pressure, and it can even be anabolic, supporting testosterone and estrogen rather than suppressing them [4]. In his conversation with Crum, he adds that Duncan French's research showed an adrenaline spike, as in a first skydive, could raise testosterone, and notes that adrenaline is made from dopamine, so it makes sense that stress can be steered toward growth [1].

He then describes Yeager's July 2022 Nature paper, "A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress," which includes six experiments [4]. Teaching either mindset alone helped buffer stress, but teaching both produced the strongest effect [4]. In the Trier Social Stress Test, where participants give a speech to a frowning, arms-crossed audience and then do hard arithmetic aloud while being told when they are wrong, students who learned both mindsets showed better peripheral blood flow, changes in cortisol and a shift toward seeing the stress as a challenge they could meet [4]. The intervention was a single 30-minute online session [4]. Huberman filled it out himself. It asks you to recall a stressful time, explains that effort changes brain connections, and tells readers that "difficulty struggle and frustration when you're learning something are not signs that you've reached your limits they're signs that you're expanding your limits" [4]. Reported results included about a 40 percent improvement in self-regard, a 14 percent improvement in passing particularly challenging courses, better pass rates in easier courses, and more willingness to take on hard challenges long after the intervention [4].

Huberman also draws limits. Whether stress helps or harms depends on its level, its duration and our beliefs about it, and he suggests stress is largely beneficial except when it becomes chronic or disrupts sleep [4]. At a live Q&A in New York, he said short-term stress of one to three days can sharpen focus, improve decisions and temporarily boost immune function, and that problems arise when stress becomes chronic, which he typically defines as sleep disruption lasting beyond about three days [5]. He recommends using sleep quality as the gauge: if stress regularly damages sleep or brings anxious dreams, it signals a deeper problem that may need professional support [5]. He also offers tools for building stress tolerance, such as brief cold exposure or short cyclic hyperventilation, practiced regularly to raise your baseline ability to stay calm under pressure [5].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

They agree that belief changes physiology, not just mood. Crum's UBS participants reported fewer physical symptoms [1]; McGonigal describes lower mortality among stressed people who didn't see stress as harmful [2]; Yeager says changing the mindset changes stress physiology [3]; and Huberman lists shorter cortisol release, greater stroke volume and better peripheral blood flow [4].

They agree that stress means you care. Crum's definition is adversity in pursuit of goals that matter to you [1]; McGonigal's is what arises when something we care about is at stake [2]. Both use this to explain why welcoming stress makes sense.

They agree the reframe is quick to teach. Nine minutes of video over a week [1], a single 30-minute online session [4], and two sessions of about 25 minutes for growth mindset [3] were enough to produce measurable effects.

They agree it doesn't mean hardship is good. Crum says combat, cancer and poverty are not good things [1]; Yeager distinguishes the stressor from the response and says the goal is to match demands with resources, not to seek difficulty for its own sake [3]; and Huberman carves out chronic, sleep-disrupting stress [4][5].

They differ on whether to calm down or gear up. Yeager criticizes typical stress advice to distract yourself with a walk or a bath before a performance, arguing you should instead get ready to perform [3]. Crum similarly advises using the stress response rather than spending energy getting rid of it [1]. Huberman, though, also teaches ways to calm down, such as breathing with longer exhales, along with NSDR and hypnosis [5]. These don't really conflict. The reframe is for moments when the stress is tied to a goal you are about to pursue; calming tools are for bringing arousal down when you need rest or sleep, and Huberman's cold exposure is meant to build tolerance for arousal, not to avoid it [5].

They differ on how much the reframe can do alone. McGonigal presents reinterpreting stress sensations as dramatically improving health and performance [2]. Yeager is more cautious: mindset effects lasted only where environments supported them, and the real lever is the belief that you have resources to meet the demand, including time, training and friends [3]. Crum adds that the enhancing mindset brings more positive emotion but not necessarily less negative emotion [1]; the reframe doesn't make stress feel pleasant.

They differ on measuring stress. Yeager argues arousal measures and wearables can't tell a helpful state from a harmful one [3]. Huberman offers practical gauges of stress load, such as sleep quality and a carbon dioxide tolerance test in which shorter exhale times signal higher stress [5]. The two views fit together: numbers can show how much stress you carry, but not whether you are experiencing it as threat or challenge.

Why It Works

Appraisal decides threat or challenge. In Yeager's model, the same stressor produces a threat response when you judge it beyond your resources, with blood kept central and cortisol released, or a challenge response when you believe you can meet it [3]. Because resources are appraised by the mind, changing beliefs can change the response [3]. Huberman describes the challenge pattern as shorter cortisol release, greater cardiac stroke volume and more peripheral blood flow [4].

The racing heart gets a new meaning. The same sensations can be read as panic or as the body sending oxygenated blood to the brain and muscles [2][3]. The idea of "being stressed about being stressed" explains why the negative reading makes things worse: it adds a second layer of stress on top of the first [3].

Stress hormones can support growth. Crum notes that stress hormones can recruit anabolic, growth-promoting hormones in physiological toughening [1], some studies show higher DHEA with an enhancing mindset [1], and Huberman adds that stress can be anabolic and that an adrenaline spike can raise testosterone [1][4].

Motivation shifts from escape to engagement. A debilitating mindset leads people to freak out or check out [1]. An enhancing mindset points the energy at the goal, which is why Crum's three steps end with using the response [1]. Checking out cuts people off from what they care about, which Crum links to depression and anhedonia [1].

Attention goes to learning. Growth mindset studies show that people who believe ability can change direct attention after errors toward analysis rather than the emotional sting [4]. Paired with a stress reframe, frustration becomes a sign of "expanding your limits" rather than hitting them [4]. Yeager's effort-beliefs research explains why this pairing matters: without it, struggle is read as proof you lack ability [3].

Stress also pushes toward connection. McGonigal argues that part of the stress and loneliness response is a biological push to seek others, which can be used rather than resisted [2].

Belief effects are general. Crum's milkshake, housekeeper and peanut-allergy studies show beliefs shaping hunger hormones, blood pressure and immune markers; in the allergy study, children taught that symptoms meant their bodies were building tolerance had less anxiety, fewer symptoms at the highest doses and better markers of tolerance [1]. The stress findings fit a broader pattern: the total effect of anything includes what we believe about it [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It works best for acute, goal-related stress. The strongest evidence comes from exams, presentations, auditions, demanding training and job pressure [1][3][4]. Crum's research found the biggest performance gains on hard tasks rather than easy ones [4].

It doesn't make chronic stress healthy. Huberman limits the benefits to stress that isn't chronic and doesn't disrupt sleep, and uses more than about three days of poor sleep as a warning sign [4][5]. If stress is regularly damaging your sleep or you are dealing with anxiety, depression or trauma, see a doctor or mental-health professional rather than relying on a reframe.

It doesn't make the stressor good. Crum is explicit that poverty, illness and combat are not good; the mindset shapes the experience, not the event [1].

It needs resources and support to last. Yeager found growth-mindset effects lasted only in supportive environments, and that if a student wants a course the school doesn't offer, mindset can't do much [3]. The challenge response depends on believing you have resources, so building real resources, such as training, time and people to turn to, matters as much as the belief [3].

It won't remove negative feelings. An enhancing mindset brings more positive emotion but not necessarily less negative emotion [1]. Expect to feel nervous and still perform.

It has to be honest. Huberman stresses that the effect is not placebo and doesn't involve lying [4]; Crum's videos were equally factual in both conditions [1]. The reframe works because the enhancing facts are true, not because you pretend.

What To Do With It

1. Name what you care about. When stress rises, identify the goal behind it, since "we don't stress about things we don't care about" [1].

2. Use Crum's three steps. Acknowledge the stress, welcome it as a sign of something you care about, and use the energy toward that goal rather than trying to make it go away [1].

3. Relabel the sensations. Tell yourself the racing heart is your body sending oxygenated blood to your brain and muscles, "a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance" [3]. Try McGonigal's lines "My heart is in it" or "I'm here for this" [2].

4. Don't just distract before a performance. Before a presentation or exam, use the arousal to get ready instead of trying to calm it away [3].

5. Check your resources, not just the demand. List what you have to meet the challenge, such as skills, preparation, time and people to ask, and build more where you're thin [3].

6. Combine the stress reframe with a growth mindset. Remind yourself that struggle and frustration mean you are "expanding your limits," and analyze errors rather than dwelling on them [4]. Don't read effort as proof you lack ability [3].

7. Teach it to someone else. Following Yeager's approach, write a short note or letter explaining how stress can enhance performance and how ability grows, addressed to someone facing what you're facing [3][4].

8. Watch your sleep. Treat several nights of stress-disrupted sleep as a sign that stress has become chronic, and ease the load or get professional help [5].

9. Practice with manageable stress. Put yourself in safe but challenging situations, such as brief cold exposure, to train calm under pressure [4][5].

10. Reach out. When stress comes with loneliness, treat it as a signal to connect rather than withdraw [2].

Sources

1. Dr. Alia Crum: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance · Huberman Lab
2. The Positive Side of Stress & the Science of Self-Control with Kelly McGonigal · The School of Greatness
3. Dr. David Yeager: How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance · Huberman Lab
4. How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset · Huberman Lab
5. LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman Question & Answer in New York, NY · Huberman Lab