The Math Test That Changed How We See Stress

Picture a community college classroom on exam day.

The students are in developmental math, courses for people who didn’t place into college-level math. For many of them, math exams are a familiar source of dread. Hearts pound. Palms sweat. And the thought arrives almost on cue: I’m nervous. This is going to go badly.

Before one of those exams, psychologist Jeremy Jamieson and his team at the University of Rochester tried something unusual. They didn’t tell the students to relax.

The experiment

Students were randomly assigned to read one of two short sets of materials before their exam.

One group got the advice most of us have heard all our lives: if you feel stressed, try to ignore it.

The other group learned something different. The physical signs of stress, like a racing heart and quick breathing, are the body preparing to perform. They deliver more blood and oxygen to the brain and muscles. They can actually help.

That was it. No breathing exercises, no therapy, no extra study time.

In the first study, with 93 students, those who learned to see stress as helpful reported less anxiety about being evaluated and scored better on the exam that followed. A larger follow-up with 339 students found the same pattern in real classrooms: better exam performance, less tendency to see stress as a threat, less procrastination, more persistence in the course, and more adaptive hormonal responses to the exam.

The lesson didn’t make the stress disappear. It changed what the stress meant.

The engine is revving

Here’s one way to think about why that works.

Picture two drivers at a starting line, both engines roaring. The first is a professional. To her, that roar sounds like power. The second has never raced before. To him, the same sound feels like danger.

Same engine. Same noise. Completely different experience.

Your stress response is that engine. A pounding heart is your body revving up to meet a demand. The question is how you interpret the sound.

Challenge vs. threat: what your heart is actually doing

Psychologists describe two broad ways the body responds to a demanding moment, and the difference shows up in your cardiovascular system.

In a threat response, you feel the demands outweigh what you can handle. Blood vessels tend to constrict, and the body braces for damage.

In a challenge response, you feel you have the resources to meet the demand, even a big one. The heart pumps more efficiently, blood vessels stay more open, and more oxygen reaches the brain and body. It’s the physiology of rising to the occasion.

From the inside, both can feel like the same pounding heart. Underneath, they’re different. In an earlier lab study, Jamieson and colleagues found that people taught to see their arousal as helpful showed exactly this shift: more efficient heart function and more relaxed blood vessels under stress.

That may be what the math students were tapping into. Their hearts still raced. They just raced in a more useful direction.

(The other half of this story, what to actually say to yourself before a big moment, is in our article Get Excited About Being Nervous.)

Where it gets complicated

This isn’t a claim that all stress is good.

Jamieson has emphasized that reappraisal is for short, high-stakes moments you’re motivated to perform in, like an exam or a presentation. It isn’t meant for chronic stress, or for situations people can’t control, like illness, financial hardship, or an unsafe environment.

And even good stress has a second half. An engine can redline for a race. It can’t redline all day, every day.

How this shapes MIMR

Athletes have long known that growth comes from stress plus recovery. Stress without recovery leads to burnout. Recovery without challenge leads nowhere. MIMR is built around both halves.

The challenge half. Work is full of exam-day moments: a big pitch, a tough deadline, a hard conversation. So is MIMR itself. Every re-measurement is a small performance moment, and some people walk in with their hearts already racing. We want them to know what those math students learned: that racing heart is their body getting ready, not a sign something’s wrong.

The recovery half. The Recovery Room is where the engine cools down. With measures like heart rate variability, people can see how well their bodies bounce back after stress. Over each 90-day cycle, the goal isn’t to stress less. It’s to recover better, so you’re ready for the next race.

Try this next time

The next time your heart starts pounding before something important, don’t fight it. Try a different thought:

“My body is getting ready. This energy is here to help.”

You don’t have to calm the engine down. You just have to steer it.