Good Stress Vs. Bad Stress

Stress is often a dirty word surrounded by the thought of last minute deadlines, juggling a career and family life and even sleepless nights. However, that’s only half the story as stress can also be the drive to complete tasks on time and push you beyond your comfort zone toward new achievements.  In essence, stress occurs when there is a perceived discrepancy between the demands of a tasks and an individual’s perceived ability to cope with the demands of the task. Though when properly managed and understood, stress can actually act as a positive pressure that motivates us to push ourselves and achieve our potential. As long as the gap between perceived ability to cope and demands of the task is not too overwhelming! Here’s how you can identify between good and bad stress, and use good stress to your advantage:

Good Stress

Stress is necessary for survival, hence why your ancestors survived; they saw the big bear and ran! Stress can often be a good thing, it helped your ancestors survive and now it can help you perform in your job. Such stress is called ‘Eustress’ which helps one make those difficult decisions, meet deadlines, get over a rejection letter, and help you prepare and work towards goals. Good Stress is what stimulates us to go out and get things done. Good stress is what adds that fuel to our fire, and keeps your thought process on its toes for those activities that require that little extra effort such as presenting to colleagues or a job interview.  So stress can be ok in safe amounts.

Bad Stress

Distress is when the level of stress begins to be harmful where we perceive that a task is just too much and we go beyond just pushing ourselves a little. This is when stress should be dealt with through positive coping strategies such as talking about it with others who will listen. If negative coping strategies are used (such as too much caffeine during work or alcohol afterwards ) and the distress is not dealt with that when things can get ugly, resulting in higher blood pressure, unforeseen aggression, and loss of sleep.

Negative coping strategies allow stress to build upon itself and there are long term negative psychological and physical consequences of elongated periods of stress.

Optimal stress is a healthy balance between ‘keeping busy’ eustress and avoiding overload distress stress and is what needs to be focused on in the workplace environment, as it allows peak performance and gives you or your employees paramount work levels.