Stress has a branding problem. Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues that most of us have the wrong relationship with discomfort entirely, treating stress like a malfunction instead of what it actually is: a signal that we’re growing.
In our interview, Damour breaks down why chasing a permanent state of calm backfires, why naming an emotion measurably shrinks it, and why “feeling bad” can sometimes be the clearest sign of mental health rather than its absence.
About the speaker: Dr. Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist and the author of three New York Times best sellers, including Untangled and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. She hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, collaborates with UNICEF, and is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Damour speaks around the world on child and adolescent development, family mental health, and adult well-being, and served as a consultant to Pixar on Inside Out 2. She graduated with honors from Yale University and worked for the Yale Child Study Center before earning her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan.
00:00:35 Chapter 1: How to cope with stress
00:05:54 Train stress like a muscle
00:11:42 Recover like you mean it
00:22:13 Chapter 2: Developing a better relationship with your emotions
00:29:39 Express it or tame it
00:37:25 Empathy isn’t free
00:40:00 Chapter 3: The psychology of teenagers
00:44:41 Struggling AND thriving
00:54:08 Just listen
00:59:18 The seven transitions that turn kids into adults
Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Dr. Lisa Damour. I’m a clinical psychologist. I’m an author and I’m the co-host of Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Raising Tweens & Teens podcast. Today on Big Think, we’re going to talk about a few different things.
First, we’re going to talk about why stress is actually a good thing. Then we’re going to talk about why uncomfortable emotions are not to be chased away. And then we’re going to talk about what it means to be a growing person. That especially vivid time of life that is adolescence, what it means to have one, what it means to have been one.
So, stress is a big topic these days and for good reason. We as a culture, as a generation, are dealing with some pretty stressful stuff. We have digital technology infusing every aspect of our lives. This means we are constantly exposed to a new stream of information that can be pretty upsetting. And we’re also in a time where we talk about what I call sort of optimization. This sense of every minute should be put to the best possible use to make us the best possible people. This is pretty stressful.
So the way that we should think about stress, it’s like our personal hype squad, right? Stress shows up when we’re faced with a challenge or something that’s new or something that’s different. And stress is our personal hype squad that shows up to get us ready, to marshal our energy, to focus our attention. Stress is fundamentally helpful. It lets us rise to challenges.
So, one of the problems we have right now is that stress has been given a bad name. People think you’re not supposed to experience stress. That somewhere out there there is this zen state you’re supposed to get to and you’re supposed to live there. That’s not how this works. Stress is part of life. Stress will always come up when changes occur. With this misunderstanding, this idea that stress is somehow bad, people have an unhelpful reaction to stress. They become stressed about being stressed. The hype squad shows up and they think, “Why is the hype squad here?” That is not a helpful way to think about stress. And when we get stressed about being stressed, we’re more likely to avoid stress. We’re more likely to become uncomfortable, unduly uncomfortable in the face of stress. we don’t necessarily harness it to help us perform and manage our lives in the way that we want to.
We want to be really careful with this idea, this wrong idea that stress is somehow bad. Because if we go with that idea, then we’re going to move into a space of thinking, well, how can I reduce or eliminate stress in my life? The only way to reduce or eliminate stress in your life is to narrow your life tremendously. To stop taking on new experiences, to stop doing hard things. Nobody wants that. We don’t grow. Life is uninteresting. We need to accept that reasonable levels of stress are actually part of life. That anytime we’re going through a change, we’re going to experience stress. And stress is not only not bad, it’s actually a sign that we are growing. And if we can embrace it as such, there’s so much to be gained from it. So stress is good and growth giving within reasonable limits and it’s absolutely to be expected and we should welcome it into our lives as a sign that we are doing new and interesting things.
But we can’t be stressed all the time. So if we go back to that idea of stress being like a hype squad, you don’t want the hype squad around all the time. That becomes exhausting. That becomes tedious. That becomes really wearing on us. So if we’re stressed all the time, we become impatient. We become brittle. We become tired. And then of course, if we’re stressed all the time, we don’t even sleep all that well. So we’re tired from feeling the stress of the day. And then we tend to sleep poorly at night, only compounding the problem. So while we want to accept and welcome stress as a normal part of life, we also want to make sure that it’s happening within limits and that we get a chance to rest and recover.
So when psychologists get concerned is when people are faced with chronic stress, which is stress without the opportunity to recovery. They’re stressed all the time. The hype squad never goes away. Under conditions of chronic stress, we start to see real wear and tear both on the brain and on the body. Our brain becomes hyper sensitized and overreactive to even minor changes in the environment. Our bodies are contending with an ongoing stream of cortisol and other stress hormones that elevate our blood pressure that can interfere with sleep that really start to break down essential functions in our body. So, as much as stress is good in that it can help us rise to the occasion when we need to, we do not want to have stress and all of the hormones and all of the bodily changes that come with it, we don’t want to have that happening all the time.
At its extreme, stress becomes trauma. Now, trauma is a word that people use a lot and they use it in different ways. The way that psychologists think about trauma is that it’s any experience that overwhelms your ability to cope with it. So, what’s traumatic to you might not be traumatic to me. It depends on the context, the experience, our life histories. But trauma is something we absolutely want to avoid at all costs. There’s no benefit to becoming psychologically or physiologically overwhelmed. And one of the things we know from the research is that when people are traumatized, especially if they’re traumatized repeatedly, it rewires the nervous system. They stay on high alert all the time. A door shuts loudly and they are reacting as though it’s a gunshot. So trauma is enormously hard on the nervous system. It’s hard on the person with that nervous system and it can be hard on the people around the traumatized person. Luckily, we’re great at treating trauma if the reaction lasts over time. But trauma is something to be avoided at all costs.
Perception is a skill that requires dedicated effort and practice to improve. Herman calls this “visual intelligence,” the ability to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt to visual information in one’s environment. In this class, a favorite from the Big Think archive, art historian Amy Herman explains how visual intelligence can help you better comprehend your situation at work and in life.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.