How do you feel about this statement?
- Effect stress are negative and should be avoided.
- Experiencing stress promotes learning and growth.
- Feeling stressed depletes my health and energy.
- Feeling stressed my performance and labor productivity.
- Feeling stressed interferes with my learning and development.
- De-stressing improves health and well-being.
- Feeling stressed slows down my work and productivity.
- The effect of stress is positive and should be used.
Here are eight items on the Stress Perception Scale developed by Cram, Salovey, and Achor (2013) to determine whether you perceive stress as enhancing or debilitating. Cram and other researchers consistently show that the way you think about stress shapes how stress affects your body, your well-being, and even how you age.
How thoughts change your biology
Stress is the experience or expectation of difficulty in achieving our goals (Cram, 2023). Its impact on health and performance depends not only on how much stress we are exposed to, but also on its duration, intensity and, most importantly, how we respond. Adaptive responses—such as acknowledging stress, reframing it as improvement, and using stress to move toward self-worth—can reduce damage and sometimes even lead to growth.
Adaptive stress
Stress is often blamed for everything from headaches burn. When you are faced with a challenge, your adrenal glands release cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is catabolic: It breaks down tissue to provide immediate energy. Although beneficial in the short term, chronically high cortisol can wear down your body and mind, suppress your immune system, and contribute to long-term health problems.
DHEA, on the other hand, is anabolic. It supports tissue regeneration, immune function, brain health and learning. DHEA is also its precursor sex hormones. During stress, DHEA is released along with cortisol to help your body recover and adapt. High levels of DHEA are associated with improved mood, cognitive function and stability.
Cortisol mobilizes resources for survival, while DHEA buffers the body and promotes healing and adaptation. A higher DHEA/cortisol ratio is associated with better stamina, training, and health; A low ratio of vulnerability to chronic stress, negative mood and cognitive decline (Phillips et al., 2010). DHEA peaks at an early age and declines with age. The DHEA/cortisol ratio is even a predictor epigenetic aging (Takeshita et al., 2025).
How do you feel about stress?
How you interpret and respond to stress—your thoughts, behaviors, and coping strategies—directly affect this hormonal balance. Flexible thinking and adaptive actions help maintain healthy balance and support your body’s ability to recover and grow.
What thoughts go through your head when you’re stressed? What measures do you take? How do these choices affect you?
Approaching stress with flexible thinking and adaptive actions helps your body produce more DHEA than cortisol. This supports recovery, endurance and training. Hard or negative thinking and avoidance/reactive behavior allows cortisol to dominate, reducing your body’s ability to heal and learn.
Flexible Thinking: Evidence from Research Rethinking Stress
Now that we know how we think about stress affects how we experience it, now what? We can’t just convince ourselves to get excited about stress. Fortunately, we don’t have to. In 2023, Krum’s team tested a “metacognitive” intervention in three randomized controlled trials, including 239 employees at a Fortune 500 company after layoffs. The intervention had three elements: 1) teaching participants the dual nature of stress (both reinforcing and debilitating); 2) explain the power of mindfulness on health and performance; and 3) train participants in a three-step strategy for adopting a stress-reducing mindset—recognizing stress and their reactions, welcoming stress as a sign of personal values, and motivationand actively use energy from stress to solve problems. To implement this practice, participants identified daily tips to remind themselves to strengthen their stress-relieving mindset.
In all three tests, this metacognitive approach was more effective than traditional “three cheers for stress” techniques. Employees who received the intervention—delivered in person or online—showed greater and more sustained reductions in stress-related thinking along with improvements in physical health and work performance. These benefits even after exposure to negative information about stress and during periods of extreme stress, such as COVID-19 pandemic
Cram’s findings suggest that empowering people to understand and actively choose how they think about stress can create more resilient and adaptive responses that support both mental and physical resilience. By cultivating a stress-resilient mindset and choosing adaptive behaviors, you support not only your mental health, but your biology.
What could change if you saw stress as a challenge for growth?
Application of Cram’s metacognitive approach
You can influence your growth index—and your resilience—by intentionally shaping your thoughts and actions when you’re stressed. Here are the practical steps based on his research:
Recognize both sides of stress: Chronic, debilitating injury and stress it wears us down over time. And again? Stress is necessary for growth. When we stress them, our muscles grow and they then recover. In the most difficult crises –PTSD, moral damage, loss– we can find stabilitybigger warning, wisdom, authority, clear values, deeper relationships, gratitudeand sense purpose. Some researchers believe that transformational change cannot occur without stress or crisis.
Remember the power of imagination: How we think about a situation greatly affects our physiology. Placebo effects, fake surgeries, and even re-enacting what is considered exercise all show the influence of the mind. In stress research, how we think about stress affects our biology – so how do you want to think about it?
Cultivating a stress-relieving mindset:
- Acknowledge your stress: What’s stressing you out right now? What feelings do you know? You worrying or excitement? How do you know? These sensations may be similar in the body, but we behave differently depending on our interpretation. What happens in your body? What do you think? How do you behave, or what do you want to do? What are the unmet needs? Simply naming and learning about your stress will reduce your stress response and activate your prefrontal cortex.
- Welcome your stress: You don’t have to convince yourself that stress is great, but you can remember how beneficial it is. Avoiding or dealing with stress drains energy, while dealing with it can improve performance and remind you of what’s most important. Pay attention to your beliefs about stress. When you catch yourself thinking “this is too much”, try thinking “this is hard and I can grow from it”.
- Use your stress: Like a pearl oyster, you can grow from stress and use its energy to move toward your values. It’s not about seeking unnecessary stress, it’s about learning the stress that comes with a meaningful life.
Find a daily anchor to remind you to do the three steps above—for example, “When I drink my morning coffee, I practice acknowledging, welcoming, and using my stress.” Also, identify stressors: “When I feel my heartache, I acknowledge, acknowledge, and use my stress.”)
Adaptation measures:
Choose constructive coping behaviors: Accessing support, using relaxation or problem-solving techniques increases DHEA (Heaney et al., 2014). Exercise also increases DHEA and decreases cortisol, supporting resilience. Sleep, downtime, and restorative practices help restore DHEA levels (Phillips et al., 2010).
Which of these steps is most accessible to you right now? What is one small action or thought shift you can try this week?
You can’t always control the stressors in your life, but you can shape your thinking and actions in response. By cultivating flexible, compassionate thoughts and choosing adaptive behaviors, you support not only your mental health, but your biology. What could change if you saw stress as a call for growth and responded accordingly?
