Kelly McGonigal nearly succumbed to the stress of grad school, had she not begun to dance with it instead.

The tango, actually.

It was 2000, and she'd just finished her first grueling year at Stanford. She'd aced her courses but felt overwhelmed and socially isolated. She was alarmed at the rate her fellow first-years were dropping out and was freaking out about the rough road ahead. In short, she was majorly stressed out.

Then something happened on her way to her Ph.D. She took a mindfulness course that presented different relationships one can have with stress. Things like fighting it, pushing it away, letting it roll over you -- or even figuratively dancing with it.

"(The instructor) was demonstrating these ideas in the class," McGonigal says in a recent phone interview while in New York promoting her latest book, "The Upside of Stress," the fourth in her field of health psychology. "So he grabbed me in a sort of tango hold and started dancing with me. (The symbolism) was that you can work with stress, use it to your advantage. It doesn't have to be a bad thing."

This mindset shift -- embracing stress as a motivator, an energizer -- worked. Today, McGonigal, 37, is a Stanford University lecturer in the School of Medicine's Health Improvement Program and a senior teacher/consultant for the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. In 2010, Forbes put her on its 20 Inspiring Women list. Her previous book "The Willpower Instinct" was a best-seller. She's been featured in global TED Talks online -- her 2013 talk about befriending stress garnered more than 7 million hits. And she's been quoted in reports in media outlets from CNN to the Washington Post as a leading expert on the mind-body relationship.

And though that early "tango" set her on the path to new personal views of stress, the concept that the much-maligned emotion could actually be good for you -- if you perceive it as such -- hadn't crystallized for McGonigal until about five years ago.

That's when she spotted a startling study that tracked the effects of various levels of stress on a group of adults. Findings showed that stress was indeed harmful -- but only for those who believed it was harmful. Yet the people who viewed it as beneficial -- even those with high stress in their lives -- had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study.

"That really got my attention," she says. "For years, even though I'd been living this (more positive view of stress) myself, I taught the familiar message I'd gotten from all my training in psychology and medicine -- that stress was toxic. I gave the kind of stress-reduction advice we've all heard a million times.

"But when (stress) is really harmful is when you're under stress and you're trying to avoid stress," she adds. "You're more likely to isolate yourself, more likely to procrastinate, less likely to seek out the help you need. And that makes it worse. When you ask people what strengthens your physical body, it's challenges, it's adversity, it's growth. The same thing applies here. Make use of the focus and energy that stress gives you, instead of wasting time trying to manage stress."

Path of progress

McGonigal's previous path in life started off in the visual arts. Yet even then, she took a scientific approach to her work.

"I'd spend hours every day doing portraiture, and what I really got out of the process was to keep looking at what's there, trying to capture it accurately, look again, see it more clearly, see what's really there," she says. "That process of looking to see what is true and translating it for others to understand, is really what I do in terms of health psychology, in looking at the scientific literature, really seeing what's there and communicating it in a practical, useful way."

Indeed, in her 2013 TED Talk and in "The Upside of Stress," McGonigal translates scientific research into common terms as she lays out her assertions about the benefits of stress -- even the social benefits.

"You've heard of the hormone called oxytocin, sometimes called the cuddle hormone," she says. "It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts to do things that strengthen close relationships. What most people don't understand about it -- it's a stress hormone.

"Your pituitary gland pumps this out as part of the stress response, motivating you to seek support. It nudges you to tell someone how you feel instead of bottling it up. And you notice when someone else is struggling, and you want to help."

Oxytocin also acts on your body, she says, to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. "Your heart has receptors for this hormone. It helps heart cells regenerate and heal. This stress hormone strengthens your heart. Your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience. And that response is human contact."

A tech convert

Jenny Dearborn, chief learning officer at SAP who made the National Diversity Council's Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology list for 2015, moderated a talk with McGonigal at a recent Commonwealth Club lecture and has since become "a new follower" of McGonigal's approach to stress.

"I can honestly say her work has significantly changed my life for the better," Dearborn says in an email. "I now see stress as a force for good that helps me harness energy and passion, and willpower as a tool and choice that I control."

McGonigal admits that she wouldn't necessarily ask to pile on more stress in her life, but she's gained a new appreciation for its role in the human experience.

"The harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable," she says, "at least when you choose to view your stress response as helpful."

Follow Angela Hill at Twitter.com/GiveEmHill.