In his book The Hardiness Effect, Dr Paul Taylor explains this idea, which sits behind one of the most compelling demonstrations of psychological framing – a now-famous study from Harvard University.
Researchers studied a group of female hotel room attendants who spent their days doing physically demanding work, yet many didn’t see themselves as getting much exercise.
The researchers split the group in two. One group was told their daily work (pushing vacuum cleaners, changing sheets) was excellent exercise that met the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. The other group had no such information.
Four weeks later, with no change to their actual routines, the informed group showed real physical improvement – lower weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio and BMI compared with the control group. Their bodies had responded to nothing more than the knowledge that their work counted as exercise – proof that our expectations shape our physical reality.
The value of negative emotions
Our expectations about stress work the same way. A 2016 German survey by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development found that people who see value in unpleasant emotions – recognising that nervousness, anger or disappointment can be useful and appropriate – tend to be happier than those who try to eliminate them.
They also showed better physical and mental health outcomes, recovering more quickly from distress and showing better muscle strength than those who saw negative emotions as simply harmful.
Your ability to choose how you respond to stress is far more flexible than you might think, and it can shape both your performance under pressure and your physiological response.
The challenge versus threat mindset
Jeremy Jamieson, chair of the psychology department at the University of Rochester, became interested in this after noticing, as a student athlete, that teammates got ‘amped up’ before a game but fell apart before an exam. Both were high-pressure situations, so why did the same arousal help in one and hurt in the other?
His insight was that it came down to how the students interpreted their body’s signals. Before competition, a racing heart and quickened breathing were read as energising. In the exam hall, the same sensations were read as warning signs of failure – and that expectation became self-fulfilling.
To test this, Jamieson worked with students preparing for the GRE, a high-pressure exam required for most postgraduate study applications in the US. All participants sat a practice exam in the lab.
Beforehand, half were given a short message to read. It said feeling anxious during a test doesn’t hurt performance, and can even help it, so any arousal they noticed could be working in their favour. The other half got no message.
The results were striking. That one-minute instruction improved scores on the mock exam and led to better performance on the real GRE months later, particularly in maths where anxiety usually does the most damage. The intervention group scored around 10% better than the control group; a difference that could shape university admission outcomes.
The takeaway: it’s not the stress itself that determines the outcome but how you interpret it. View your racing heart as a positive, energising response rather than a liability and your body can respond accordingly. The stress response becomes an ally, not an enemy.
- Edited extract from The Hardiness Effect: Grow from stress, optimise health, live longer by Dr Paul Taylor, a keynote speaker, podcast host and thought leader with post-graduate qualifications in psychology, exercise science, nutrition and neuroscience.
