You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who likes being stressed out. Who really wants to feel overwhelmed by the weight of the world? What’s more, chronic — or prolonged — stress is linked to myriad health and quality of life issues, from raising the risk of heart attack and stroke to increased sexual dysfunction and decreased desire.
But there’s more to stress — that tension or strain you experience as the brain and body respond to a perceived threat or demand — than being overcome by it. In fact, experts point out that despite the word’s seemingly negative connotation, it’s really a neutral, functional response in animals and humans that helps keeps us alive (as in fight-or-flight scenarios) — and can help us thrive.
“I think stress has gotten a bad name. You need a certain amount of stress to live,” says Bob Rosen, a psychologist and chief executive of Healthy Companies International, a leadership consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia. It’s about finding a middle ground — how much acute, or short-term, stress you can handle — experts say, and properly managing it to use it to your advantage. “You don’t want too little, because you’ll go to sleep, and you don’t want too much, because it’ll overwhelm you,” says Rosen, author of “Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World.”
[See: 8 Unexpected Signs You’re Stressed.]
Research reveals that moderate amounts of stress can be helpful in a number of ways. “It can be beneficial to brain function,” says Daniela Kaufer, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the neurobiology of stress and resilience. One area of the brain that’s particularly sensitive to the effects of stress is the hippocampus. “So with exposure to chronic stress, you could see detrimental effects on the hippocampus that also are followed by effects on cognitive function and learning and memory deficits,” Kaufer says. But moderate, short-lived stress actually can boost memory, increase how alert a person is and improve cognitive function and performance.
Of course, how we experience this tension varies greatly from one person to the next — even in the same scenario. Biological markers — like increased levels of the hormone cortisol — are important for understanding what’s happening physiologically when we’re under pressure, but people’s own self-assessments of how they think stress is affecting their health tend to be particularly telling. “If you’re really trying to predict how harmful a stress response is, one of the strongest predictors is self-evaluation: You give somebody a questionnaire, and you ask them to tell how much stress they’re feeling, and what are the effects of stress on them,” Kaufer says.
The way you experience stress, as an individual, is significant. While it’s impossible to direct the increasingly fast-paced, evolving world around you, experts say it’s critical to take stock of the personal control you do have. “People tend to think of themselves as sort of on their game or off — I’m either stressed or not,” says Joshua Klapow, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of public health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But the reality is more nuanced than that. “It’s a fine line. Most of the time, we have control over our response,” he explains. That goes not just for how we might handle things outwardly and inwardly — like with self-talk (say, being encouraging to yourself, rather than catastrophizing); it also extends to our physiological response.
[See: 8 Ways Meditation Can Improve Your Life.]
“The physiology of the stress response is very, very malleable to things like how we appraise the stress response and to interventions,” such as physical exercise and turning to social support, Kaufer says. Everything from taking deep breaths, to breaking a sweat, to meditation and yoga and eating a balanced diet, along with leaning on friends and family for support, can ease the tension. In addition to mitigating the potentially negative health effects, experts say doing these kinds of things and prioritizing a healthy lifestyle allow a person to harness the power of moderate stress to improve performance at work — and in life in general — in an ever-changing world. “Physical health, emotional health and spiritual health are very important — they make a person hardy; and that gives them the tools to use the changes and the stress associated with those changes in a positive way,” Rosen says.
Emotional health includes being self-aware and focusing on positive emotions. That doesn’t mean denying unpleasant emotions such as sadness and anger, he says. Rather it’s about experiencing the power of emotions like hope, and being optimistic and compassionate. “The more people live in their positive emotions … and can course correct when they do feel those negative emotions, to bounce back into their positive emotions,” the better able they’re going to be to manage stress effectively, Rosen says. He adds that resilience is also an important component of emotional health. “We have an incredible capacity to bounce back — to manage through adversity,” he says. “Whether there’s a loss in your life or you get fired or something — a crisis in your life — we can fall down and get up, and people have to remember that, and they have to have confidence in themselves that they can get back up and withstand the heat and go on with their lives.”
In speaking about spiritual health, Rosen says that might involve religion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. “From our research, the most successful people are people who have a higher purpose — they believe in something bigger than themselves, and that helps them manage through all these changes,” he says. Along with strong relationships, he emphasizes the importance of generosity. “Generous people who have a sense of gratitude experience less stress. They feel better about themselves, they’re grateful for what they have,” he says. “They’re not trying to be somebody that they’re not. They’re not always yearning for something more.”
To properly manage stress, Rosen also recommends paying attention to your energy level, since it can be easy to get overwhelmed. “We have to reinvigorate or refresh ourselves with vacation and holidays and going to the gym and the like,” he says.
[See: 8 Ways to Relax — Now.]
Not that hitting on all cylinders isn’t its own reward. When you do find the middle ground that works for you — experiencing some helpful stress, but not being overwhelmed — experts say you’ll know it. “There is a feeling inside your body that you’re excited, you’re learning, you’re growing. You can let things happen to you and they bounce off you. You have a positive attitude. You feel good physically,” Rosen says. “You don’t get hijacked by rejections or disappointments — they hurt, but you can get through them quickly.
“So there’s sort of a vigilance, a hardiness that you live life with.”
More from U.S. News
9 Ways to Boost Your Immune System
9 Foods That Can Keep Your Brain Sharp
Harness the Power of Stress originally appeared on usnews.com
