What do you think of these statements?
- the effect of stress negative and should be avoided.
- Experiencing stress facilitates learning and growth.
- Experiencing stress is draining my health and my life.
- Experiencing stress increases my performance and productivity.
- Experiencing stress hinders my learning and growth.
- Experiencing stress improves health and quality of life.
- Experiencing stress reduces my performance and productivity.
- The effects of stress are positive and should be used.
These are eight items from the Stress Mindset Measure developed by Crum, Salovey, and Achor (2013) to assess whether you perceive stress as aggravating or debilitating. Krum and other researchers continue to study how your thoughts about stress shape how stress affects your body, your well-being, and even your age.
How thoughts change your biology
Stress is the experience or expectation of difficulties in the pursuit of our goals (Krum, 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 reinforcing, and using stress to reorient you toward your values—can reduce damage and sometimes even lead to growth.
Adaptive stress
Stress is often blamed for everything from headaches tiredness. When faced with challenges, the adrenal glands release cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is catabolic: it breaks down tissue to provide energy quickly. While beneficial in the short term, chronically high cortisol can tire 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 repair, immune function, brain health and learning. DHEA is also its precursor sex hormones. During times of stress, DHEA is released along with cortisol and helps your body repair and adapt. Higher DHEA levels are associated with better mood, cognitive function, and improvement endurance.
Cortisol mobilizes resources for survival, while DHEA buffers the body, promoting healing and adaptation. A high DHEA/cortisol ratio is associated with endurance, learning, and good health; a lower ratio indicates chronic stress, negative mood, and weakness cognitive decline (Phillips et al., 2010). DHEA peaks in early adulthood and declines with age. The DHEA/cortisol ratio is even predictive epigenetic aging (Takeshita et al., 2025).
How do you feel about stress?
How you react to and respond to stress—your thoughts, behaviors, and coping strategies—directly affects your hormonal balance. A flexible mindset and flexible movement support your body’s ability to heal and grow, helping you maintain a healthy ratio.
What thoughts go through your mind when you are under stress? What actions do you take? How do these choices affect you?
Approaching stress with flexible thinking and flexible actions helps your body produce more DHEA than cortisol. It supports recovery, perseverance and learning. Hard or negative thinking and avoidant/reactive behaviors allow cortisol to take over and reduce your body’s ability to heal and learn.
Adaptive thinking: Evidence from the Rethinking Stress study
Now that we know how we think about stress affects how we experience it, now what? We just can’t 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 one involving 239 employees at a Fortune 500 company after they had been fired. The intervention consisted of three elements: 1) educating participants about the dual nature of stress (both reinforcing and debilitating); 2) explain the impact of thinking on health and performance; and 3) training participants in a three-step strategy—adopting a stress-enhancing mindset—recognizing stress and its responses, accepting stress as a sign of personal values, and motivationand actively use energy from stress to solve problems. To make this practical, participants identified daily tips to remind themselves to practice stress-reducing thinking.
In all three trials, this metacognitive approach proved to be more effective than traditional “three cheers for stress” methods. Employees who received the intervention, either in person or online, showed greater and sustained increases in stress-reducing thinking, along with improvements in physical health and work performance. These benefits persisted even after exposure to negative stress information and during acute stress COVID 19 pandemic.
Krum’s findings suggest that empowering people to understand and actively choose their thoughts about stress can create durable, adaptive responses that support both psychological and physical resilience. By developing adaptive stress-relieving thinking and choosing adaptive behaviors, you’re not only supporting your mental health, but your biology as well.
What can change if you see stress as an invitation to growth?
Applying Krum’s metacognitive approach
By deliberately shaping your thoughts and actions during times of stress, you can influence your growth index and resilience. Here are some practical steps based on his research:
Recognize both sides of stress: Chronic, debilitating trauma and stress wears us down over time. And yet? Growth requires stress. Our muscles get bigger when we get stronger and then they repair. In the most difficult crises –PTSD, moral injury, loss– we can find endurancebigger awareness, wisdom, competence, defined values, deeper relationships, gratitudeand feeling goal. Some researchers believe that transformational change does not occur without stress or crisis.
Remember the power of thought: How we think about a situation has a significant impact on our physiology. Placebo effects, fake operations, and even reimagining what is considered exercise—all show the effects of thinking. In the study of stress, how we think about stress affects our biology – how do you want to think about it?
Develop a stress-relieving mindset:
- Acknowledge your stress: What is stressing you right now? What emotions do you know? Are you anxious or excited? How do you know? These feelings may appear similar in the body, but we behave differently depending on our interpretation. What is happening in your body? What you think? How are you doing or what do you want to do? What unmet needs are involved? Naming and learning about stress reduces your stress response and activates the prefrontal cortex.
- Welcome your stress: You don’t have to convince yourself that stress is great, but you can remember that it’s good for you. Avoiding or dealing with stress drains energy, while dealing with it can increase productivity and remind you of what’s most important. Pay attention to your beliefs about stress. When you think “this is too much”, try to switch to “this is hard and I can grow from it”.
- Use stress: Like an oyster that makes a pearl, you can grow from stress and use its energy to act on your values. It’s not about seeking unnecessary stress, it’s about learning from 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 recognizing, welcoming, and using my stress.” Also, identify stress triggers: “When I feel my heart racing, I remember to acknowledge, accept, and use my stress.”)
Perform adaptive actions:
Choose constructive coping behaviors: asking for help, using relaxation techniques, or problem solving increases DHEA (Heaney et al., 2014). Exercise also increases DHEA and decreases cortisol, which supports endurance. Rest, downtime, and recovery practices help restore DHEA levels (Phillips et al., 2010).
Which of these steps feels most comfortable to you right now? What small action or thought can you 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 flexible behaviors, you support not only your mental health, but your biology as well. What can change if you see stress as an invitation to growth and respond accordingly?
