stress: the surprising link to higher performance and a more meaningful life Artwork

Blooming Outside the Lines

Blooming Outside the Lines is a podcast for women who have spent their lives trying to be good enough and instead feel tired, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, and often guilty about their body size or their eating. If that’s you, you’re not alone and you deserve to be you—even if others disagree.

I’m a licensed psychologist who’s worked with women for over 30 years. I understand how hard it is to relax or take time for self-care, and the deep pull we feel for approval—approval that often defines us.

We’ll talk about how the brain and our capabilities change when we ignore our self-care, wait until we have time for it, can’t say no, or fear disapproval.

I’ll provide support, encouragement, and practical strategies for building your confidence from the inside out, for stepping into your own truth and blooming into the most radiant version of yourself.

The information shared in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers and does not mean we have a client/therapist relationship.

All Episodes

Blooming Outside the Lines

stress: the surprising link to higher performance and a more meaningful life

April 07, 2026 • Dr. Deb, Creating Choices PC • Season 1 • Episode 13

0:00 | 18:15

Most of us believe that stress is bad for us and anxiety something to be feared or avoided. In my last episode I explored misconceptions about anxiety that leave us fearing it. In this episode, I share

a look at research supporting how embracing anxiety and stress can benefit our performance.
how our view of stress affects our physiology and whether experiencing that stress will be detrimental or life-enhancing.
how stress is related to a meaningful life.

The studies cited in this episode were described in Dr. Kelly McGonigal's book, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.

To learn more from Deb,

Visit her website at https://creatingchoicesdeblang.com/ for information about her online courses and free info sheets and guides designed to support you as you navigate life’s challenges.

If you struggle with feeling good enough, check out her book Never Enough—Separating Self-Worth from Approval.

To help other women find this podcast, please consider leaving a review. Here’s how

—on Apple Podcasts: open the app, find this podcast, scroll

down and tap “Write a Review”

—on Spotify: open the podcast page and tap the stars

Thank you. Your review doesn’t need to be eloquent, and it will help women discover the show.

If you’d like to support the making of Blooming Outside the Lines, you can do so here: ko-fi.com/bloomingoutsidethelines

There is no expectation—please do what is responsive to you. Listening and sharing are also meaningful ways of supporting the podcast.

This transcript was created using AI and has had some light editing. Please forgive transcription errors. Thank you.

If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

Hi there and welcome. In my last episode, is fear and anxiety robbing you of your confidence, I shared my concerns that all the messages we hear about the dangers of stress and that we should be calm are robbing us of our confidence – that the body is designed to gear up to help us meet challenges and threats and trying to prevent a normal physiological process in the body just isn't going to work very well and can cause more problems than good.

In this episode, I want to share some studies that I hope will encourage you to start thinking about stress and anxiety in a new way, and that will maybe even encourage you to embrace your anxiety and to see the stress and challenges in your life in a more positive light.

In my next episode, I'm going to talk about the nuts and bolts of how to go about doing that, as that isn't always easy. And that's part of the reason I want to share these studies so that you have a basis, an idea, a reason, some research that supports that these changes can be helpful in your life.

You can find much more about what I'm going to share with you in Dr. Kelly McGonigal's book, The Upside of Stress. I will put a reference to that book in the show notes. I believe that I have mentioned her books before. She does a wonderful job of presenting research in a really easy to understand and interesting manner. And so if you're a reader, it would be a great book to check out.

In thinking about anxiety or our response to stress, what most of us don't realize, I didn't realize this until I learned about it, is the body over time has evolved to have different stress responses to help us deal with the different challenges or threats that we face. In my last episode, I introduced the challenge response, and I want to talk a bit more about that.

This is a response that's designed to help us perform at higher levels. It helps us to think more clearly, to have better focus, to have more energy. Most of us mistake this response as being anxiety or danger, and our fear of our symptoms changes our body's response to one that would be helpful if we were facing a threat to our lives and which backfires when we're facing a challenge.

An example of how people learn to use the challenge response to their advantage is in a study by Jamieson. In this study, students were coached on how beneficial the symptoms of anxiety that they had previously feared would be to them in doing well on a test that they were about to take.

The results supported this. Those students who had received that coaching outperformed the other students despite physical measures indicating that they were actually experiencing high stress.

So the coaching didn't relax them, what made a difference was in how they were evaluating or seeing the gearing up in their body. They weren't trying to make it go away. They were telling themselves, this is going to help.

Dr. McGonigal shares many examples of this. For instance, in a study by Alison Brooks, one group of individuals who are about to give a speech were told to relax and calm their nerves by saying to themselves, I am calm. The other group was told to embrace their anxiety and say, I am excited.

Neither strategy made the anxiety go away, the group that told themselves to say, I am excited, felt better able to handle the pressure, and their speeches were rated as more persuasive, confident, and competent than those who had tried to calm down.

In another study, and this one looked at the physiological benefits of embracing stress, in this study participants, and I believe these were people with social anxiety, participated in a study where they were interviewed and the interviewers had been coached to give them no positive feedback and instead to give negative feedback, like rolling their eyes. And so this was a very extremely stressful experience.

One group watched a video with the message that stress is enhancing, that it can improve our performance and help us grow. group received the message that stress is bad and the usual messages of how it can harm your health, happiness, and performance.

After the interviews, they looked at the saliva of the participants and they measured the ratio of cortisol to DHEA. Both of those are stress hormones and one is not good and the other bad. And DHEA helps your brain grow stronger from stressful experiences and it also counters some of the negative effects of cortisol. We need both of these.

It's the ratio that is important in the long-term consequences of stress, especially when stress is chronic. Higher cortisol levels can be associated with impaired immune function and depression. In contrast, higher DHEA levels have been linked to reduced risk of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and other conditions that we typically think of as being stress-related.

The ratio of DHEA to cortisol is called the growth index of the stress response. The higher the growth, I can't seem to say that word. The higher the growth index, meaning the more DHEA, the more it helps people to thrive under stress.

According to McGonigal, a higher growth index predicts academic persistence in college students as well as higher GPAs. During military training, was associated with greater focus, less dissociation, superior problem-solving skills, as well as fewer PTSD symptoms later. A higher growth index has even been shown to predict resilience in extreme circumstances, such as recovering from child abuse. So it's positive. It's a positive thing to have a higher growth index.

So back to the study. The videos had no effect on cortisol levels. Everyone's cortisol levels went up during the stressful interview, as would be expected.

And here's where it got interesting. Those who had watched the stress enhancing video had higher DHEA levels and so a higher growth index than the other group. Meaning that experience was more life enhancing for them than for the other group.

I hope this study helps to make viewing stress differently less subjective by seeing how changing our views of our symptoms can actually change our physiology for the better and improve the outcomes of experiencing stress.

I was going to talk about the Tend and Befriend stress response, which is another stress response designed to help us face challenges and I think I will come back to that one in another episode.

Before winding up, I want to share few more studies that show the positive long-term effects of viewing the stress in our lives in a positive light. In 2013, researchers from both Stanford University and Florida State University asked a broad sample of adults in the United States to rate how much they agreed with the statement. Taking all things together, I feel my life is meaningful.

They then looked at what distinguished those who believed their lives were meaningful from those who did not. And surprisingly, stress rated high as a predictor for a meaningful life. Interestingly, and probably not what we would expect, people who had experienced the highest number of stressful life events in the past were most likely to consider their lives more meaningful. And the same was true for those who related being under a lot of stress at the time of the study.

The researchers concluded that people with meaningful lives worry more and have more stress than people with less meaningful lives. And this is thought to be due to the connection between stress and pursuing goals related to things that are important to us.

It reminds me of what I shared with you in the last episode when Merida spoke of the two opposing forces or qualities, the desire to have a rich and fulfilling life, to be a hard worker and want to do things well, and the opposing desire for peace and security. And because of those opposing desires or forces,

Stress or distress is going to be inherent. It's going to be there. It's how we look at that distress or whether we see that distress as being problematic that makes a difference.

In another study, and I apologize that this episode is so research-based, and I really hope it's helpful to have some facts to support the idea of thinking about your stress in a different way. So this was a study between 1961 and 1970 that included about 1,300 men living in the Boston area.

And over the next five decades, the men reported on two types of stress, major life events like divorce or being in a serious accident, and the number of daily hassles that they faced.

Interestingly, of the two types of stressors, daily hassles were found to be more problematic than the major life events. Men reporting more daily hassles were three times more likely to have died. Of course, the media was all over this. I can't remember the exact headlines, and they were along the lines of, science shows stress is bad for you or will kill you.

Unfortunately, these claims were misleading. When the data was examined more closely, it wasn't the presence of the everyday stress that was killing the men. It was their attitude toward it. The men who were more likely to have died were men who viewed their daily hassles as burdens rather than being meaningful.

It was this mindset that best predicted the risk of death. And according to Dr. McGonigal, the takeaway from this study shouldn't have been to try to decrease daily hassles. And instead, it should have been to change your relationship with everyday experiences that you perceive as stressful or as hassles.

The last study that I want to share with you seems to back that up. This study was conducted by the Department of Veteran Affairs and followed more than a thousand adults for 10 years. The study asked participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade, they also reported more conflict at work and at home and more negative outcomes like getting fired or divorced.

And this didn't matter where they started out when starting the study. The tendency to avoid stress made things worse for them over the following decade.

I hope what I have shared with you has provided some motivation and some evidence to support you in thinking about stress and anxiety in a new way. Since you're listening to this podcast, it's very likely that you have a high desire for a meaningful life. From what I shared in the last episode and this episode, having a meaningful life seems to be related to having more stress. So if there's going to be more stress, doesn't it make sense to learn how to use it in a way that supports you rather than trapping you in fear?

How to change your view of stress and anxiety and the nuts and bolts of how to do that will be the topic of my next episode. Until then, take good care and bye bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.