a fight-or-flight response, the emergency instinct
that has given stress a bad reputation. When a per-
son has a fight-or-flight response under the pressure
to perform, psychologists call this a threat response.
A threat response isn’t an overreaction of the stress
response system—it’s an entirely different kind of
stress response, one that primes you more for self-
defense than for success. Let’s consider how these
two responses differ and why the right kind of stress
response can enhance your performance under pres-
sure. We’ll also look at what science can tell us about
how to tap into a challenge response even when you
feel threatened.
First off, there are important physiological dif-
ferences between the two responses that can affect
your immediate performance and the long-term con-
sequences of stress. One of the biggest differences
has to do with how stress affects your cardiovascular
system. Both a threat response and a challenge re-
sponse prepare you for action—something you can
feel when your heart starts pounding faster. But dur-
ing a threat response, the body is anticipating physi-
cal harm. To minimize the blood loss that might fol-
low a nasty fight, your blood vessels constrict. The
body also ramps up inflammation and mobilizes im-
mune cells to prepare you to heal quickly.
In contrast, during a challenge response, your
body responds more like how it does during physi-
cal exercise. Because you aren’t anticipating harm,
the body feels safe maximizing blood flow to give you
the most possible energy. Unlike in a threat response,
your blood vessels stay relaxed. Your heart also has a
stronger beat—not just faster but with greater force.
Each time your heart contracts, it pumps out more
blood. So, a challenge response gives you even more
energy than a threat response.
These cardiovascular changes have implications
for the long-term health consequences of stress. The
kind of stress response associated with an increased
risk of cardiovascular disease is a threat response,
not a challenge response. The increased inflamma-
tion and blood pressure can be helpful in the short
term of an emergency but can accelerate aging and
disease when chronic. This does not seem to be true
of the cardiovascular changes you experience dur-
ing a challenge response, which put your body in a
much healthier state.
In fact, the tendency to have a challenge response,
rather than a threat response, is associated with su-
perior aging, cardiovascular health and brain health.THE SCIENCE OF STRESS HANDLING STRESS
The study of accident survivors at the Akron
trauma center was just the first of several showing
that a stronger physical stress response predicts bet-
ter long-term recovery from a traumatic event. In
fact, one of the most promising new therapies to pre-
vent or treat PTSD is administering doses of stress
hormones. For example, a case report in the American
Journal of Psychiatry described how stress hormones
reversed post-traumatic stress disorder in a 50-year-
old man who had survived a terrorist attack five years
earlier. After he took 10 milligrams of cortisol a day
for three months, his PTSD symptoms decreased to
the point that he no longer became extremely dis-
tressed when he thought about the attack. Physicians
have also begun to administer stress hormones to pa-
tients about to undergo traumatic surgery. Among
high-risk cardiac-surgery patients, this approach has
been shown to reduce the time in intensive care, min-
imize traumatic stress symptoms and improve qual-
ity of life six months after surgery. Stress hormones
have even become a supplement to traditional psy-
chotherapy. Taking a dose of stress hormones right
before a therapy session can improve the effective-
ness of treatment for anxiety and phobias.
If these findings surprise you, you aren’t alone.
Most people believe that the body’s stress response is
uniformly harmful. Stress hormones are seen as tox-
ins to be eliminated, not as potential therapies to be
explored. From the conventional point of view, your
body betrays you every time your hands get clammy,
your heart races or your stomach twists into knots.
To protect your health and happiness, the thinking
goes, your number one priority should be to shut
down the stress response.
If this is how you think about the stress response,
it’s time for an update. While the stress response can
be harmful in some circumstances, there is also much
to appreciate. Rather than fearing it, you can learn
to harness it to support resilience.
One of the most important ideas from the new
science of stress is that we have more than one stress
response in our repertoire. In a situation that re-
quires us to perform under pressure—like an athletic
competition, a public speech or an exam—the ideal
stress response is one that gives us energy, helps us
focus and encourages us to act: the challenge re-
sponse. It gives us the motivation to approach the
challenge head-on, and the mental and physical re-
sources to succeed.
Sometimes, however, performance stress triggers