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• Posted March 21, 2026

Want To Stress Less? Start With These Everyday Habits

SATURDAY, March 21, 2026 (HealthDay News) — You probably know someone who never loses their cool — even in a situation that would send most folks into a panic.

How come they don’t freak out under pressure?

Chalk it up to something called "psychological flexibility."

"They’re able to change the way they think about the situation and then use brain resources to handle the stress," explained Lina Begdache, an associate professor of health and wellness studies at Binghamton University in upstate New York.

She and her colleagues recently published results of a survey that sheds light on the underpinnings of this ability to constructively adapt one’s thoughts, emotions and behaviors to changing situations.

Their findings were recently published in the Journal of American College Health.

For the study, they asked 401 college students (58% of them women) about their diet, sleeping habits, exercise, use of alcohol and marijuana and more.

The takeaway: Those who made it a point to follow a healthy lifestyle were better positioned to cope with stress.

Eating breakfast five or more times a week and exercising at least 20 minutes a day were linked to greater resilience through psychological flexibility processes. 

Using weed, frequently chowing down on fast food and burning the midnight oil were associated with less. 

A serving of fish oil four or more times a week also helped, the study found.

In earlier research, Begdache had already established that a good diet boosts resilience while poor diet tamps it down.

The new study adds a critical piece to the puzzle: Psychological flexibility is the pathway through which diet and lifestyle changes shape resilience.

"The new finding here is that diet and lifestyle don’t just make you resilient by themselves," Begdache said in a news release. "They help you build the psychological flexibility, which, in turn, makes you a resilent person."

Psychological flexibility enables a person to "step back" and use their brain’s resources to better process and understand their emotions, she said.

"When we’re under stress, we feel like we fuse with the stress. We live the stress," Begdache said. 

"But psychological flexibility is like stepping back and thinking, 'I feel this because of that. What can I do?'" she continued. "Identifying your emotions sometimes helps you find the solution for these emotions."

The upshot: If you’d like to be more resilient, eat a healthy breakfast, make it a point to sleep at least six hours a night, be active and try a little fish oil.

More information

There’s more about psychological flexibility at the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

SOURCE: Binghamton University, State University of New York, news release, March 17, 2026