Kevin Kroskey's Money & Mind

By all accounts, stress—and its accompanying emotional mix of frustration, anxiety and fear—are bad for your health. When you experience stress in your body, you release increased amounts of glucose from our liver into your blood, and your body produces cortisone, which is actually toxic to your system. Your heart rate goes up, sending more enriched blood to your muscles. Your immune system kicks into high gear, and you stay in this high-alert state, which is only designed to help you, combat real threats, depleting you physically. Now, researchers have discovered that stress is contagious—that is, you can catch it from those around you, and even from the evening news.   Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted an experiment where they gave individuals a series of very challenging arithmetic questions and interviewed them—in both cases, in order to induce direct stress. They had another group of subjects watch the test and interviews through