6 ways to shift your stress mindset to dial down daily anxiety

To deal with a stressful world, many of us try to avoid and reduce the stress. But what we believe about stress may have just as important a role in helping us deal with it.

Psychologists call this our “stress mindset” — our belief that stress can debilitate us or enhance us and have positive consequences.

Research from the past decade shows that these beliefs can affect our psychology and physiology; people who are more inclined to see the positives of stress are more likely to experience improved performance, boosted mood and, in fact, reduced stress.

Importantly, you can change your stress mindset, experts say.

“If somebody perceives that stress has benefits for them, they’re likely to engage in a stressful situation much more adaptively,” said Sarah Williams, a sport and performance psychologist and associate professor at the University of Birmingham in England.

Having a stress-is-enhancing mindset is less about “Pollyannaish” positive thinking or toxic positivity and more about acknowledging that a stressful experience can “lend itself to growth, to opportunities,” said Alia Crum, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University who first developed a psychological measure for stress mindsets in 2013.

“So rather than trying to remove stresses and calm everybody down, it’s about trying to help people understand the benefits of when they feel stressed, what those responses can do for them, how they can fuel them to perform better,” Williams said.

In other words, stress — and how we think about it — may actually help us thrive.

The negative effects of stress are still real. Stress, especially if it is chronic, can cause physical and mental illnesses or premature aging.

But the true nature of stress is more complex.

“The body’s stress response was not designed to kill us,” Crum said. “It was designed evolutionarily to help our bodies, brains, and minds rise to the occasion and meet the challenges and threats that we are faced [with].”

(When most people say “stress,” they are usually referring to “distress,” the negative side of stress. Eustress, by contrast, is what researchers consider motivating and energizing stress.)

There are four ways that our mindsets change how stress affects us, Crum said.

First, what we believe changes what we pay attention to. Believing that stress is inherently harmful can cause people to overly fixate on the bad and “freak out or check out” as a result, Crum said.

Second, our stress mindset changes what we are motivated to do. When people believe stress can be enhancing, they are more likely to engage with it in appropriate ways.

Third, what we believe changes our emotions. “Something I always tell people is often the detrimental thing is not the stress,” Williams said. “It’s the stressing about the stress.” Conversely, believing that stress is enhancing can boost positive emotions, research shows.

And fourth, there is evidence that mindset can change our body’s physiological response to stress, including by decreasing levels of salivary cortisol, our body’s principal stress hormone.

Research shows that having a more stress-is-enhancing mindset is linked to better mental health outcomes in the long run, including higher resilience, more optimism, and lower anxiety and depressive symptoms, Williams said.

Crum said she has tested stress mindsets in different groups of people — students, athletes, workers — across different cultures, and, on average, all groups fell more on the stress-is-debilitating side of the scale.

The one exception she has found? Candidates working to become Navy SEALs. “These are people who are literally choosing to go into one of the most stressful experiences, professions that exist on the planet,” Crum said. “So they must have a belief that stress can serve them.” (Nevertheless, Navy SEAL candidates who had greater stress-is-enhancing mindsets were more likely to persist through training, have faster obstacle course times, and have fewer negative evaluations from their peers or instructors.)

This is not to say that the stressor, whether it’s a big job interview, getting an F on an exam, or a tough relationship conversation, is necessarily a good thing or something we enjoy.

But the stressor is distinct from our experience of the stress.

“You’re only stressed about things that matter to you,” Crum said. We should “welcome stress” because stress is “a sign that there’s something you care about.”

Shifting stress mindsets — and reaping the benefits — is possible for anybody, even for those with the deepest struggles, researchers say.

Early research found that presenting people with evidence of the benefits of stress could shift their mindset and confer psychological and physiological benefits.

In a 2017 study published in the journal Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, Crum and her colleagues presented 113 participants with a three-minute video that emphasized either the enhancing or debilitating properties of stress. Afterward, participants took part in a mock job interview — a typically stressful activity — and received either positive or negative feedback.

Participants who learned that stress is enhancing experienced more improvements to their positive emotions regardless of whether they were told they performed well or poorly. They also exhibited more cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to adapt our thinking and behavior to different contexts. Conversely, participants who learned that stress is debilitating had worse cognitive and emotional outcomes.

But more recently, Crum and colleagues found that giving a more holistic perspective of stress and emphasizing the power of mindsets may be even more effective, according to a 2023 study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. This “metacognitive” approach improved self-reported physical health symptoms and work performance compared with people who were wait-listed for the training.

And compared with participants who learned only about the positive benefits of stress, those who received the metacognitive approach were more able to maintain the stress-is-enhancing mindset even when presented with evidence of negative effects of stress a week or two later.

People who can imagine themselves succeeding in a stressful situation may further shift their belief that stress can be enhancing, according to a 2023 study conducted by Williams and colleagues. “We’re almost training the brain to connect the responses to stress with that positive outcome,” Williams said.

Researchers are careful to note that just because our stress mindset matters, it doesn’t mean it’s “all that matters,” Crum said. “It’s just one piece of the puzzle to help us live happier, healthier, more productive lives.”

Here are steps experts say you can take to shift your stress mindset.

Acknowledge the stress. Instead of denying it or trying to suppress it, say what is stressing you aloud. Notice your physiological responses — elevated heart rate, sweatier palms — and remind yourself that “this is my body preparing for me to perform,” Williams said.

Welcome the stress. It is a sign that there’s something you care about, which can be focusing and energizing if you allow it to be.

Use the stress response. Instead of expending effort and resources trying to avoid the stress, “utilize the narrowed focus, the increased arousal and energy that happens in the body in order to meet the goals that you have,” Crum said.

Fuel your stress mindset. Think about a time in your life when you’ve excelled or grown the most. “Anytime you want to, you know, level up, there’s usually some stress involved,” Crum said. “So we just need to remember that is evidence to fuel and sustain the belief.”

Try stress-mindset micropractices. Take moments to reflect on what stresses you have and what you care about most. This is something Crum says she does when she makes the transition going up the stairs into her workplace and again when returning home.

Complement with other stress management strategies. More research needs to be done about what contexts and scenarios call for different approaches to stress, experts say. But strategies such as reframing negative experiences and slowing our breath also can help alleviate stress and improve mood.