The good and bad of stress

Introduction

First and fore most what is stress? In order to reduce stress, it may help to know what stress is and what stress is not.  There are so many stressors throughout our life and we can’t get rid of all of them but we can learn to manage elements in our life that allow us to navigate various stressors with greater ease and adaptability. There is acute stress, chronic stress but also eustress or positive stress and distress or negative stress.  Let’s talk about each one.

Acute Stress: is a short term, intense future anticipatory stress that can come in small doses and can be healthy. It can be short burst of energy that helps improve focus and motivates a person to get tasks completed. Examples of this may be the excitement one feels for playing a competitive sports game.

Chronic stress: is a longer-term type of stress that can occur when a person has to deal or handle conditions that seem to have no end. An example of this may be financial stress, a chronic illness or a toxic work environment.

Eustress : This is a form of stress that has an emotional impact. This excites us, motivates us and an have a benefit to our lives.

Distress: This is a form of stress that has a negative connotation. This left unaddressed can cause increased pain, anxiety or leads to negative psychological challenges.

The benefits of stress

Stress is more or less a situation or event that can act as catalyst for improving how we show up for an event or our work day. With small bouts of stress, memory and and alertness can improve; so given an athletic situation when an athlete knows there is a “big game on the line” it can challenge the athlete to increase their level of attunement to her teammates, surroundings, or the learning of plays. Or when a student knows that there will be a presentation or exam on a certain day. If that student plans on doing well, or completing the assignment, the student will tend to participate in studying or researching that will create a comprehensive and final project. Those bouts of stress to accomplish the immediate task at hand helps to improve the focus and clarity needed for a positive outcome. This type of stress can also build up the resilience or tolerance to dealing with stress which can help with being better prepared for any give situation. However, when that stress becomes too much, the opposite can happen.

The risk of too much stress

Although there is no actual timeline or timeframe when a good stress becomes a bad stress, it is really all about ones psychological threshold, however it can be when we work in a state of positive stress without allowing for a psychological break, we can tax ourselves and create more distress due to fatigue, frustration, or burnout. In order to prevent that from occurring, it becomes important to remove the stress at some point. When stress is not removed it can cause cardiovascular, nervous system, gastrointestinal, or musculoskeletal issues. When an athlete experiences too much negative stress, a few things can happen. Decreased muscle recovery, heightened pain response, and overtraining con occur. That means it becomes harder to build muscle due to the effects on our hormones like testosterone, cortisol, and human growth hormone and when we have a slower than normal recovery, it can take longer to recover from this over training.

Stress managment practices

As I mentioned earlier, excessive stress can cause negative cardiovascular effects as well as other however cardiovascular effects will be a focus here. Therefore, we can monitor our heart rate variability by reducing training volumes. We can practice improvement in sleep hygeine which can be hard for many people however prioritizing sleep allows for tissue recovery and when tissues are recovered they are better able to take on training stresses. Incorporating “de load” weeks which means every few weeks we reduce the training volume. We still workout but we just don’t go quite so hard. Finally, breathwork such as meditation or simple box breathing

can help down regulate our heart rate.