How to Make Stress Work for You: The One Mindset Shift Navy SEALs Use to Thrive Under Pressure

Stress doesn’t ruin performance — misinterpreting stress does. When you see stress as a challenge rather than a threat, your body supports focus, strength, and clarity instead of panic.

Study of 30,000 people proves believing stress is harmful increases death risk 43%. Navy SEALs who view stress as enhancing perform better. Here’s how to shift.

You’re about to give a presentation to senior leadership. Your heart is pounding, your palms are sweating, and your breath comes in short bursts. You tell yourself: “This stress is going to kill my performance. I need to calm down.”

According to research documented in David Robson’s “The Expectation Effect,” that thought might be more dangerous than the stress itself.

In a study tracking nearly 30,000 Americans over eight years, researchers found that people who experienced high stress and believed it was harming their health had a 43% increased risk of premature death. But here’s what should stop you mid-panic attack: people who experienced high stress but didn’t view it as harmful weren’t just okay—they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who reported relatively little stress.

The stress didn’t kill them. The belief that stress was harmful did.

This isn’t pop psychology or motivational fluff. This is peer-reviewed science showing that how you think about your racing heart and sweaty palms literally changes your cardiovascular response, your hormone levels, and your long-term mortality risk. And elite performers—from Navy SEALs to professional negotiators—are already using this knowledge to thrive under conditions that would break most people.

The Science That Changed Everything About Stress

For decades, we’ve been told a simple story about stress: it’s the enemy. Hans Selye, the Hungarian-Canadian scientist who pioneered stress research in the 1930s, documented how rats exposed to various stressors developed ulcers, shrunken immune tissue, and enlarged adrenal glands. His conclusion—that chronic stress leads to disease—became gospel.

By 1983, Time magazine was declaring that “our mode of life itself, the way we live, is emerging as today’s principal cause of illness.” The phrase “stressed out” entered the English language that same year. We’ve been running from stress ever since—with gratitude journals, mindfulness apps, forest bathing, digital detox retreats.

But as Robson reveals in “The Expectation Effect,” we’ve been creating a nocebo out of modern life itself.

Jeremy Jamieson, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, suspected something was fundamentally wrong with how we think about stress. His interest began as a student athlete who noticed that how he framed pre-competition anxiety dramatically affected his performance.

What if, Jamieson wondered, the traditional view of stress was missing something critical about how our expectations shape our physiological responses?

The Study That Should Change How You Think About Every Deadline

In 1998, the National Health Interview Survey asked Americans two questions:

1. How much stress did you experience in the last year?
2. How much do you believe stress affects your health?

Then researchers tracked who died over the next eight years.

The results, published by Alyssa Keller and colleagues, were stunning:

People who reported high stress AND believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increased risk of premature death.

People who reported high stress but DIDN’T believe it was harmful? They had the lowest mortality risk in the entire study—lower even than people who reported experiencing very little stress.

Read that again. The belief that stress is killing you appears to be more dangerous than the stress itself.

“If this were a causal relationship,” Robson notes, “the combination of high stress plus the belief that stress is harmful would rank as the 15th leading cause of death in the United States.”

What Happens in Your Body When You Reframe Stress

Jamieson wanted to understand exactly what changes when you shift how you think about stress. He brought students into his lab before they took the GRE—the graduate school entrance exam that determines many academic futures.

One group received standard instructions. Another group was taught to reappraise their anxiety: to view their pounding heart as preparing them for action, their rapid breathing as getting more oxygen to the brain. They were told that stress can enhance performance and contribute to personal growth.

The students who reappraised their stress scored significantly higher on the GRE.

But Jamieson didn’t stop there. He wanted to see what was happening physiologically. In another study, he measured participants’ cardiovascular responses during a stressful public speaking task.

People who tried to simply distract themselves from their anxiety showed the classic threat response: their hearts raced, but their blood vessels constricted—the same response that, repeated over time, contributes to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.

People who reframed their stress showed something completely different.

Their hearts still raced—they weren’t “relaxed”—but their blood vessels dilated, allowing blood to flood throughout the body. According to Robson’s analysis, “That’s very similar to what happens when we exercise; it is energising the body without putting strain on the cardiovascular system.” It also allowed more blood to reach the brain, providing the cognitive boost Jamieson had seen in the test scores.

Distraction didn’t work. But reframing did.

The Hormonal Shift That Separates Threat From Challenge

The cardiovascular changes are just part of the story. According to research cited in “The Expectation Effect,” your stress mindset also changes your hormonal response.

When people are taught that stress can enhance performance, they show:

• More muted fluctuations in cortisol (just enough to stay alert, without prolonged fear states)
• Sharper increases in beneficial “anabolic” hormones like DHEAS and testosterone (which help grow and repair body tissues)

People who see stress as dangerous or debilitating? There’s barely any change in these beneficial hormones.

The relative ratios of these hormones determine how much wear and tear your body suffers from a stressful episode. When you reappraise stress, you strike a much healthier hormonal balance—as if facing an achievable physical challenge rather than an existential threat.

Why does reappraisal have this power?

For researchers like Jamieson, it comes down to the brain’s predictive processing. Your brain constantly weighs your mental and physical resources against the demands of the task to plan the most appropriate response.

If you see your anxiety as debilitating, you reinforce the expectation that you’re at a disadvantage and going to fail. Your brain responds as if facing a threat and prepares your body for danger and potential injury—constricted blood vessels, stress hormone cascade, the works.

But if you see that racing heartbeat as a sign of energy for an important event, you reaffirm that you have what you need to thrive.

“The stress response, instead of becoming this thing to be avoided, actually becomes a resource,” Jamieson explained. Your brain can focus on the task without being hypervigilant to every possible threat. Your body prepares to perform at maximum capacity without the risk of being wounded. Afterwards, you return more quickly to normal activities like digestion that you perform during rest.

How Navy SEALs Use This Under Extreme Pressure

The most compelling proof that stress reappraisal works comes from people operating under conditions most of us can’t imagine.

A study Robson cites examined U.S. Navy SEALs during their brutal special warfare training. Researchers found that SEALs with a positive attitude toward the stresses of their job showed greater persistence and enhanced performance in training.

These aren’t people trying to “think positive” through a tough workday. These are operators facing genuine physical danger, sleep deprivation, and conditions designed to break most candidates. The ones who view stress as enhancing rather than debilitating are the ones who make it through.

Reappraising anxiety has also been shown to improve:

• Performance in salary negotiations
• Presentations for people with social anxiety (less fidgeting, better eye contact, more open body language)
• Test performance in high-stakes academic settings
• Creative problem-solving under pressure

The Long-Term Health Benefits Are Real

While many experiments examined short-term benefits, longitudinal studies suggest these attitudes have significant long-term health impacts.

A survey of German doctors and teachers found that people’s attitudes to anxiety predicted their psychological well-being over a full year. Those who saw anxiety as a source of energy—agreeing with statements like “Feeling somewhat anxious makes me more active in problem solving”—were much less likely to suffer from emotional exhaustion than those who viewed it as a sign of weakness.

This matters because our culture has spent decades demonizing stress.

From the “Don’t Worry” clubs of the 1890s to today’s wellness industry, we’ve been told that anxiety and nervous tension are dangerous—especially the stresses from modern work and urban life. Because of the mind-body connection, this cultural attitude has shaped people’s actual responses to challenging events, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ve been unwittingly training our bodies to respond to stress in the most damaging way possible.

What Changes When You Shift Your Stress Mindset

Besides the physiological changes, attitudes to stress transform behavior and perception in profound ways.

According to Robson’s synthesis of the research, when people see stress as enhancing, they:

• Focus more on positive elements of a scene (like smiling faces in a crowded room) rather than dwelling on signs of threat
• Become more proactive—deliberately seeking feedback and constructive ways to cope instead of hiding from problems
• Demonstrate more creativity in problem-solving
• Are better equipped to find permanent solutions to the challenges causing distress

All these changes mean they’re not just surviving stress—they’re actually using it as fuel for growth.

How to Actually Apply This (Without Lying to Yourself)

This isn’t about pretending a genuinely overwhelming situation is fine, or gaslighting yourself into thinking chronic workplace abuse is “character building.”

The reappraisal technique works because you’re accurately recognizing what your body is doing to help you, not denying reality.

Here’s how to apply it:

Before a stressful event: Remind yourself that stress responses are your body preparing you to perform. Your pounding heart is pumping blood to your brain and muscles. Your rapid breathing is oxygenating your system. Your heightened alertness is making you sharper. These are resources, not problems.

During the event: When you notice anxiety symptoms, label them as excitement or readiness rather than fear. “My heart is racing because my body knows this matters and is getting me ready to perform at my best.”

After the event: Reflect on how you handled the challenge. Even if things didn’t go perfectly, you survived. Your body did what it was supposed to do. You’re building resilience for next time.

Long-term mindset shift: Start viewing difficult situations as challenges to meet rather than threats to avoid. This doesn’t mean seeking out unnecessary stress—it means recognizing that some pressure is inevitable and can actually improve your performance if you frame it correctly.

The Critical Distinction: Enhancing vs. Debilitating

Robson emphasizes that this isn’t about “positive thinking” in the vague sense. It’s about a specific reframe:

Debilitating mindset: “Stress is harming my health and reducing my performance. I need to eliminate all stress from my life.”

Enhancing mindset: “Stress is my body’s way of mobilizing resources. These physical sensations mean I’m ready to rise to this challenge.”

One mindset triggers threat responses—constricted blood vessels, damaging hormone ratios, hypervigilance that reduces cognitive performance.

The other triggers challenge responses—dilated blood vessels, beneficial hormone balance, focused attention that enhances performance.

Your body follows where your mind leads.

The Bigger Picture

The stress mindset research is part of the larger pattern Robson documents in “The Expectation Effect”: your beliefs about what you’re experiencing directly shape your physiological responses in measurable, concrete ways.

We’ve created a culture that treats stress as a disease rather than a natural human response to challenge. Every article warning about “toxic stress,” every wellness guru selling stress-elimination techniques, every well-meaning friend telling you to “just relax”—all of it reinforces the belief that stress is inherently harmful.

And that belief is what’s actually causing the damage.

The good news? Once you understand the mechanism, you can start to shift it. Not through force of will or positive affirmations, but through accurately reframing what’s happening in your body.

Your racing heart before the big presentation isn’t your body failing you. It’s your body mobilizing every resource it has to help you succeed.

The next time you feel that familiar anxiety rising, don’t fight it. Don’t try to make it go away. Recognize it for what it actually is: your physiology preparing you to perform at your absolute best.

Your body will believe you. And it will respond accordingly.

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FAQ SECTION

Q: Isn’t some stress actually harmful, or can you just think your way to perfect health?

A: Robson’s research in “The Expectation Effect” doesn’t claim all stress is beneficial or that beliefs alone cure everything. Chronic, uncontrollable stress—like living in an abusive situation or extreme poverty—causes real damage. The research shows that for the inevitable stresses of normal life (deadlines, presentations, challenges), viewing them as enhancing rather than debilitating changes your physiological response. You’re not denying stress exists; you’re changing how your body responds to it.

Q: How quickly can reappraising stress actually change my response?

A: In Jamieson’s studies cited by Robson, the cardiovascular and hormonal changes happened immediately during the stressful event—within the same experimental session. Students who reappraised anxiety before the GRE showed improved scores on that same test. However, making this your default response requires practice. Think of it like any skill: you get better with repetition. The German longitudinal study showed sustained benefits over a full year for those who consistently viewed anxiety as energizing.

Q: What about the 30,000-person study—could people with less stress just be healthier to begin with?

A: Researchers controlled for numerous health factors including BMI, cholesterol, smoking, and reported loneliness. The increased mortality risk for those who believed stress was harmful held up even after accounting for these variables. Additionally, people with HIGH stress who didn’t believe it was harmful had the LOWEST mortality risk—lower than people with little stress. This suggests the belief itself has physiological effects independent of actual stress levels.

Q: Does this work for people with clinical anxiety disorders?

A: According to Robson, reappraisal techniques have been tested successfully with people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. In the Trier Social Stress Test, socially anxious individuals who reappraised their feelings gave presentations with fewer visible anxiety signs (less fidgeting, better eye contact, more open body language). However, this isn’t a replacement for professional treatment. Think of it as one tool that can complement therapy and medication when appropriate.

Q: How is this different from just “being positive” about stress?

A: Huge difference. Generic positive thinking (“stress is good!”) doesn’t change physiology. Specific reappraisal of what your body is doing does. You’re not pretending stress doesn’t exist or that everything is fine. You’re accurately recognizing that your pounding heart, rapid breathing, and heightened alertness are your body’s way of preparing you to meet a challenge—which is true. The Navy SEALs study proves this works even in genuinely dangerous, high-pressure situations where generic positivity would be useless.