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How do you relate to these statements?
- The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided.
- Experiencing stress facilitates learning and growth.
- Experiencing stress depletes my health and vitality.
- Experiencing stress enhances my performance and productivity.
- Experiencing stress inhibits my learning and growth.
- Experiencing stress improves health and vitality.
- Experiencing stress debilitates my performance and productivity.
- The effects of stress are positive and should be utilized.
These are the eight items on the Stress Mindset Measure, developed by Crum, Salovey, and Achor (2013), to assess whether you see stress as enhancing or debilitating. Crum and other researchers consistently demonstrate that your mindset about stress shapes how stress affects your body, your well-being, and even how you age.
How Thoughts Change Your Biology
Stress is the experience or anticipation of adversity as we pursue our goals (Crum, 2023). Its impact on health and performance depends not just on how much stress we face, but also on its duration, intensity, and—crucially—how we respond. Adaptive responses—like acknowledging stress, reframing it as enhancing, and utilizing stress to move you toward your values—can reduce harm and sometimes even lead to growth.
Adaptive Stress
Stress is often blamed for everything from headaches to burnout. When you face a challenge, your adrenal glands release cortisol and DHEA. Cortisol is catabolic: It breaks down tissues to provide immediate energy. While helpful in the short term, chronically high cortisol can wear down your body and mind, suppress immunity, and contribute to long-term health problems.
DHEA, in contrast, is anabolic. It supports tissue repair, immune function, brain health, and learning. DHEA is also a precursor to sex hormones. During stress, DHEA is released alongside cortisol to help your body recover and adapt. Higher DHEA levels are linked to improved mood, cognitive function, and resilience.
Cortisol mobilizes resources for survival, while DHEA buffers the body, promoting healing and adaptation. A higher DHEA/cortisol ratio is associated with resilience, learning, and better health; a lower ratio signals vulnerability to chronic stress, negative mood, and cognitive decline (Phillips et al., 2010). DHEA peaks in early adulthood and declines with age. The DHEA/cortisol ratio is even a predictor of epigenetic aging (Takeshita et al., 2025).
How Do You Think About Stress?
How you interpret and respond to stress—your thoughts, behaviors, and coping strategies—directly influence this hormonal balance. Flexible thinking and adaptive actions help maintain a healthier ratio, supporting your body’s ability to recover and grow.
When you’re under stress, what thoughts run through your mind? What actions do you take? How do these choices affect you?
Approaching stress with flexible thinking and adaptive actions helps your body produce more DHEA relative to cortisol. This supports recovery, persistence, and learning. Rigid or negative thinking and avoidant/reactive behaviors allow cortisol to dominate and diminish your body’s ability to heal and learn.
Flexible Thinking: Evidence From the “Rethink Stress” Study
Now that we know our mindset about stress affects how we experience it, what now? We can’t just convince ourselves to be excited about stress. Luckily, we do not have to. In 2023, Crum’s team tested a “metacognitive” intervention in three randomized controlled trials, including 239 employees at a Fortune 500 company after layoffs. The intervention had three elements: 1) teaching participants about the dual nature of stress (both enhancing and debilitating); 2) explaining the power of mindset on health and performance; and 3) training participants in a three-step strategy to adopt a stress-is-enhancing mindset—acknowledge stress and their responses, welcome stress as a sign of personal values and motivation, and actively use the energy from stress to address challenges. To make this practical, participants identified everyday cues to remind themselves to practice a stress-as-enhancing mindset.
Across all three trials, this metacognitive approach proved more effective than traditional “three cheers for stress” methods. Employees who received the intervention—delivered in person or online—showed greater and more lasting increases in a stress-is-enhancing mindset, along with improvements in physical health and work performance. These benefits persisted even after exposure to negative information about stress, and during periods of acute stress such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crum’s findings suggest that empowering people to understand and actively choose their mindset about stress can create more durable, adaptive responses—supporting both psychological and physical resilience. By cultivating a flexible stress-as-enhancing mindset and choosing adaptive behaviors, you support not just your mental health, but your biology.
What might change if you saw stress as an invitation to grow?
Applying Crum’s Metacognitive Approach
You can influence your growth index—and your resilience—by intentionally shaping both your thoughts and your actions during stress. Here are practical steps, grounded in her research:
Recognize Both Sides of Stress: Chronic, debilitating trauma and stress wears us out over time. And yet? Stress is necessary for growth. Our muscles get bigger when we stress them, and they then repair. In the most challenging crises—PTSD, moral injury, loss—we can find resilience, greater awareness, wisdom, competence, clarified values, deeper relationships, gratitude, and a sense of purpose. Some researchers believe transformative change cannot happen without stress or crisis.
Remember the Power of Mindset: How we think about a situation significantly affects our physiology. Placebo effects, sham surgeries, and even reframing what counts as exercise all show the influence of mindset. In stress research, how we think about stress affects our biology—so how do you want to think about it?
Foster a Stress-as-Enhancing Mindset:
- Acknowledge Your Stress: What is stressing you right now? What emotions do you recognize? Are you anxious or excited? How do you know? These feelings can look similar in the body, yet we behave differently depending on our interpretation. What’s happening in your body? What are you thinking? How are you behaving, or what do you have the urge to do? What unmet needs are involved? Just naming and exploring your stress lowers your stress response and activates your prefrontal cortex.
- Welcome Your Stress: You don’t have to convince yourself that stress is wonderful, but you can remember what’s beneficial about it. Avoiding or fighting stress drains energy, while working with it can enhance performance and remind you of what matters most. Notice your beliefs about stress. When you catch yourself thinking “this is too much,” try shifting to “this is hard, and I can grow from it.”
- Utilize Your Stress: Like an oyster making a pearl, you can grow from stress, using its energy to move toward your values. This isn’t about seeking unnecessary stress, but about learning from the stress that comes with a meaningful life.
Find an everyday anchor to remind you to practice the above three steps—for instance, example, “When I have my morning coffee I will practice acknowledging, welcoming, and utilizing my stress.” Also, identify stress triggers: “When I feel my heart race, I will remember to acknowledge, welcome, and utilize my stress.”)
Take Adaptive Actions:
Choose constructive coping behaviors: Reaching out for support, using relaxation techniques, or problem-solving boosts DHEA (Heaney et al., 2014). Exercise also boosts DHEA and lowers cortisol, supporting resilience. Sleep, downtime, and restorative practices help restore DHEA levels (Phillips et al., 2010).
Which of these steps feels most accessible to you right now? What’s one small action or thought shift you can try this week?
You can’t always control the stressors in your life, but you can shape your thinking and your actions in response. By cultivating flexible, compassionate thoughts and choosing adaptive behaviors, you support not just your mental health, but your biology. What might change if you saw stress as an invitation to grow—and responded accordingly?
