Kelly McGonigal is a convert. A health psychologist who teaches at Stanford University, for years she had held to the conventional view that stress is bad for you.
But when a few years ago she came across research which suggested that stress is bad for you only when you believe it to be damaging, she had to reconsider. Indeed, the same research found that people who lived with stress but did not view it as harmful were the healthiest people of all.
McGonigal started digging deeper into the subject and the result is this book, which argues that by recognising and working with stress, rather than trying to ignore or suppress it, we can perform better and achieve more.