RAW LECTURE
I have a confession to make, but first , I want you to make a little confession to me.
In the past year , I want you to just raise your hand if you ‘re experienced relatively little stress. Anyone ? how about a moderate[ˈmɒdərət ]适度中等 amount of stress? Who has experienced a lot of stress ? yeah , me too. But that is not my confession.
My confession is this : I am a health psychologist[saɪˈkɒlədʒɪst] 心理学, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I’ve been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good , and it has to do with stress.
For years I’ve been telling people ,stress makes you sick . it increases the risk of everything form the common cold to cardiovascular[ˌkɑ:diəʊˈvæskjələ(r)] 心血管 disease. Basically ,I’ve turned stress into the enemy . but I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the united states for eight years ,and they started by asking people ,”how much stress have you experienced in the last year ?” they also asked , do you believe that stress is harmful for you health? And then used public death records to find out who died
Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the
lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.
Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.
That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th
largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide[ˈhɒmɪsaɪd] 谋杀.
You can see why this study freaked me out 吓坏了. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.
So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes.
When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress
Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out.
It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal
weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this.
Now that you're sufficiently demoralized 士气低落, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been
trained to harass[ˈhærəs]扰乱 you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.
I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments ['ɪnkrəmənts] 增长 of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can,
starting with 996. Go!
Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.
Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again.