Believing stress is bad can be deadly

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.

[00:00:10]People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.

[00:00:24]Now, the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.

[00:00:37]That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV, AIDS, and homicide. All right.