Stress... Is It All Bad???

When is the last time you felt stressed? This morning, last night, last week, last month, or maybe even right now?  Most of us experience enough stress that we can easily identify our own symptoms as well as usually what triggers us. With everyday hassles, demands, and headaches over the mountain of responsibilities, its no wonder stress is on the rise. The APA reported that in 2013 42% of adults polled reported an increase in their stress level during the past year.

For some, stress may feel like an unwelcome houseguest, it’s a commonplace way to describe our day, our work, our to-dos, and how we’re feeling. We tend to forget though the biological nature of stress, we forget that stress serves a function and if utilized properly it can actually help us. Stress tends to be advertised as a bad thing– a negative response to a situation or even more commonly, an overload of demands. So often, feeling stress is discussed as a symptom and creating balance is defined as the solution. While I’m not disagreeing, I’ll instead offer an alternative that stress may not be all-bad, in fact the ability to recognize stress is rooted in our physiology as a survival mechanism. Up until a certain point, stress serves to help us perform a variety of demands.

In 1936 Hans Selye identified & defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change”.  Translated, Selye states that stress is our body’s normal response to a perceived threat. In the case of stress perception is reality. Stress is the body’s way of responding to a challenge. What I perceive as a threatening environment and thus find stressful you may not, thus experiencing less stress than I would in the same environment. This is exactly why no two people feel the exact same stress levels while facing the same situation (demands).

The perception (feeling) of stress is highly individualized yet the impact of stress is far more global. Historically perceived threats referred to life threatening situations where the body had a physiological response (also known as adrenaline). Fortunately in today’s world, our stress levels rarely if ever are a response to a life-threatening environment yet the interesting thing is that our body is unable to tell the difference, we still react with the same release of adrenaline regardless of the perceived threat. Our body has the same physiological response to physical danger as to an important deadline. Stress is the body’s way of protecting us, biologically we are programmed to respond to stress (a threatening event) in 1 or 3 ways, also know as the fight-flight-freeze response. Remember that stress is how the body responses to a challenge. These responses are directly tied into the inner workings of our central nervous system and are bedded in our survival. Our ancestors benefited from each response in order to fend off attackers, out maneuver enemies, and also conserve energy for hunting, While we don’t have to worry about hunting our food and outsmarting attackers, the adaptations of our stress response continue to be an important skill for surviving and thriving. 

In order to thrive we have to learn to utilize stress in ways that help instead of harm us. We often associate stress with being overloaded yet in small doses stress helps us perform better, focus more, and achieve short term goals, however with prolonged or chronic stress our body can emotionally shut down (implode), explode or experience negative physical consequences. The point at which stress turns from helpful and adaptive to harmful and maladaptive is known as our stress threshold or tipping point. Up until this point, stress helps us perform better, be more focused, have better concentration, and perform for a longer period of time; however once stress exceeds this point, there is an immediate and significant drop in performance. A simple example is the fact that most of us perform our best when under a deadline, most of us cannot work weeks in advance – we will often procrastinate due to lack of focus, direction, or ideas, yet as the deadline approaches, we’re able to minimize distractions to be more productive and successful. It’s important to note that while many of us have similar behavioral tendencies, we each have a different tipping point, some may be able to work successfully up until a deadline however others may exceed their point an hour or a day before the deadline.

Interested in learning more about identifying your individual threshold? Watch for my follow up post on not only identifying your tipping point but also on the numerous factors that directly and indirectly influence our individual stress threshold.

Until Next Time ~ Be Well