Making Stress a Healthy Business and Personal Solution - The Maria Paviour Company

Making Stress a Healthy Business and Personal Solution

When you find out something that could transform the lives, and significantly reduce the deaths, of people you know, you want to tell the world and tell it quickly! And that is why I’m so passionate about getting this message out to people.

Is stress going to kill you or cure you? In this blog I talk about how stress could be the personal and business solution you have been looking for! No more litigation, no more stress-related sick leave, more profits, less turnover, happier customers, higher productivity. Yes, all these things can be yours.

One thing I love about being a psychologist is how active and alive the science is, how many new ideas are being explored and the vast amount of amazing new scientific research which is helping us to understand more and more about how we work.

This is so true for the research published 2012 on stress including that by Keller, Litzelman, Wisk et al, “Does the Perception that Stress Affects Health Matter? The Association with Health and Mortality” (2012) University of Wisconsin, School of Medicine and Public Health.

A long term piece of research carried out in the US found that if you experience high levels of stress, and you believe that this is bad for you then you have a 43% increased risk of dying. The important thing here is that these two work together, the high level of stress and the belief. Over the 9 years of the study 183,000 people died in the US from what the researchers see as these two working together. Stress levels and Belief that stress is dangerous.

Kelly McGonigal Stanford Psychologist has pointed out that this makes the belief in stress being as harmful as one of the major killers in the US. It rates as the number 15 risk of pre-mature death above HIV Aids, Skin Cancer and murder.

Just changing your perception of what is happening to you can save your life.

Throughout my work as a psychologist I have always explained the stress response as being part of a process of helpful responses; when you experience stress your heart pounds to get you energized and ready for action, your hands and legs may get shaky, that’s just loads of energy going to those parts in readiness, your breathing increases to oxygenate your body and your irises dilate so that you see more, notice more, you become sharper.

Now, however, I can take this even further, stress can be a healthy response. Not only does it make you perform better in short doses but, if you believe it to be a positive thing, then it is of no more danger to your health than anything else in life.

There is much more to this though, because more evidence has shown that when we think and act in the right way stress can be of positive benefit to us and even heal us. More on that in my next blog, so look out for it!