Something to readWorkload & wellbeing
The Upside of Stress
A book arguing that stress can work for you, and showing how to get better at it
Why it’s worth your time
How you think about stress can change how it feels and what you do with it, and this book makes that case at length. Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford, gathers research suggesting that seeing it as a resource can help people perform and connect with others. It's likely to help most with the pressure of a big presentation or deadline, and less with a load that never lets up.
How to use stress to perform better at work
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Start with the part on stress as energy for a challenge.
McGonigal's own page lists four areas the book covers: stress as a source of focus and energy, stress as something that can bring people closer, learning and growing from hard experiences, and finding meaning in difficult times. For work pressure, the first is the natural place to begin.
- Rethink the next nervous moment.
Before your next presentation or hard meeting, notice your heart rate and breathing, and tell yourself it's your body getting ready. Afterward, write one line on how it went.
Good moments for this: before a big presentationin a deadline weekafter a stressful stretch
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Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Where people share when they're stretched, reaching out comes naturally. Where they don't, telling one trusted colleague may be enough to start.
What might make this harder
Skip the slogan and try the smaller step: notice what your body is doing and name what it might be getting you ready for. If that doesn't help either, this may not be the tool for you.
Questions people ask
What is The Upside of Stress about?
Kelly McGonigal argues that how you think about stress shapes its effects, and that stress can help people focus, connect and grow. The book mixes research, stories and exercises.
Is there a short version of The Upside of Stress?
Her TED talk from 2013, How to make stress your friend, covers the core idea in about 14 minutes and is free on TED's site.
Is the science behind The Upside of Stress solid?
One reviewer, the psychologist Robert Epstein, argued in Scientific American Mind that it treats correlations as causes, while giving it credit for recent experiments showing that hearing about stress's upside helps some people.
How can I use stress to perform better at work?
McGonigal's suggestion is to read signs like a racing heart as your body preparing to meet a challenge. It may help with a presentation or a deadline.
What it says, and how it holds up
Kelly McGonigal spent years, by her own account in her TED talk, teaching people that stress makes them sick, and then changed her mind. This book is her case that the belief you hold about stress shapes what stress does to you. It draws on research about mindset, the social side of the stress response and how people grow from hardship, and pairs it with short exercises.
At work, its most usable idea may be the reframe before a high-stakes moment: the racing heart and quick breath can be read as your body mobilizing to meet it. In the talk she describes a Harvard study in which people taught to see their stress response as helpful showed a healthier cardiovascular response; she adds that they felt less anxious and more confident. She also argues that stress has a social side, nudging you to seek and give support, which is a fair reason to tell a colleague you're stretched. That free talk is a good fourteen-minute way to start.
Reviewing the book in Scientific American Mind in 2015, the psychologist Robert Epstein faulted it for treating correlations as causes, starting with a 2012 study in Health Psychology in which people who reported a lot of stress, and felt it had hurt their health a lot, were more likely to die over the following years. He suggested that people whom stress harms less may simply come to believe it's harmless, and the study's own authors wrote that it couldn't establish cause and that poor health might partly explain the link. Epstein credited newer experiments in which learning about stress's upside helped some participants, and argued the book overstates how many. Where you land may depend on whether you want a tool for a hard moment or a verdict on stress itself.
If your stress comes from a workload no outlook will shrink, a mindset shift leaves the cause in place. That usually calls for a conversation about scope, and if stress is affecting your health, a visit to a doctor.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.