Live longer with stress as your friend and the long term gains of short term pain

4 minute read

This week Kelly McGonigal helps me learn how making stress your friend helps you live longer, and my local car wash team reminds me how choosing short term pain is the smart option where it opens the door to longer term gain.

Make stress your friend and live longer

In a study of 30,000 people over eight years in the United States, researchers found that people who experienced very high levels of stress in the previous year had a 43% increased chance of dying.  But only if they believed stress was bad for them. 

People that had high levels of stress, but also believed it wasn’t bad for them had the lowest risk of dying of anyone. Including those people who reported low levels of stress.

Kelly McGonigal shared this interesting and counter intuitive result in her TEDx talk.  Extrapolating the results, it would make believing stress is bad the #15th highest cause of death in the US, behind diabetes and cancer.

Changing how you think about stress can change how your body responds to it.

If you believe that stress is just your body preparing you to something that you care about, it is helpful not harmful.

And this can dramatically reduce the impact stress has on the body. It makes your blood vessels stay relaxed, just like in moments of joy and courage.

Over a lifetime of stress events, thinking this way helps your heart stay healthy. And that helps you live longer.

In another study of 200,000 people results revealed health outcomes were also better when people were less pessimistic. When you expect the worst, you feel stress and think the worst will happen and you put your heart and nervous system under more pressure. And over a long period of time doing this can be harmful

Nobel Prize scientist Elizabeth Blackburn and health psychologist Elissa Epel found that destructive thoughts can damage our telomeres—the protective tips that reside at the end of chromosomes. One of 5 types of toxic thought patterns that have contribute to a shortened life span, is pessimism. They found it creates shorter telomeres which is an indicator of a truncated life span.

A simple solution may be the best way to turn around our thinking on stress.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School and specialises in how emotions are constructed in the brain and experienced in the body. 

She uses a simple strategy of telling herself her emotions are just electrical currents in the brain. This line of thinking helps her recognise that stress and negative thoughts are just temporary and often helpful indicators to pay attention to.

When she experiences intense feeling like stress, she remains curious as to what they are telling her. Feelings of stress to Lisa is just her body helpfully getting ready to do something she cares about.

So, next time you need to give a presentation or take an exam and your heart starts pounding, perhaps think of the stress you feel as just an electrical current running through your mind that’s helpfully preparing you to do something you care about. 

And that’s a good thing.

How choosing short term pain brings longer term gain

I live in Sydney, not too far from the ocean. It’s a fun place to live, but the salt in the air causes corrosion on anything metallic, including your car. I’ve learned that to stop rust spots forming, its best to wash the car regularly to get rid of the salt that builds up over time.

On the weekend I visited my local car wash to get the job done. I’d been there dozens of times before. This time however, the automated car wash stopped mid cycle. Two guys came rushing to my car to remove a hose that had become tangled in one of the spinny things that washes the side of the car.

Image generated by Leonardo.Ai

I wondered if it had caused damage to the car, but thought they’d let me know if it had. I was a regular customer. But I was wrong.

After being told my car was ready and ushered into the drivers seat, I remembered about the problem earlier. I jumped out and saw two deep scratches on the driver’s side door. No one had told me about them. Needless to say, I wasn’t amused.

I asked where the owner was and was told he had left for overseas that day and would be back in a month. After which he’d give me a call and sort it out. Now I was getting grumpy.

I asked the most senior guy to contact the owner and call me the next day with their proposed solution. I called my insurance company and they helpfully told me damage caused by a car wash facility was excluded from my cover. So I was reliant on the staff at the car wash to find a solution with the owner who was overseas.

I got a call the next day and what happened next surprised me and taught me a lesson in choosing short term pain for long term gain.

The person at the other end of the phone, who was at the car wash the previous day said,

“After you left yesterday, we got together as a team and decided we would all chip in and pay for your car to be fixed. We have arranged for a mobile car repair service to come to your home this week and they will take care of it for you. You are our valued customer, it was our fault, and we are sorry we didn’t alert you to the scratch before you saw it.  While we can’t get hold of the owner, you having your car repaired is the most important thing we can do.”

Wow.

The cost of the repair will be around $800.  They are splitting that cost between five of them. All teenage boys who work part time.

They chose to take short term pain of funding the repair works, believing it was in everyone’s long term gain to do the right thing.

Shit happens as they say. The smart decision is to take short term pain where it opens the door to receiving much bigger longer-term gains. My car wash friends have not only retained me as a long-term customer, I’m also now an advocate for their business. Long term it will help bring them more customers – a bigger gain than choosing the path of trying to avoid the problem.

And I’ll make sure their boss refunds them for the repair costs when he returns from his trip overseas.

Nice work boys.

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