Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile.
It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage.
Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s.
And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed.
I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress.
And we just did a little intervention.
If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge.
And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.
Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention.