The Positive Side of Stress

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The Positive Side of Stress

As many people have noted, the stress response can be enormously helpful.

Surging adrenaline enables people to perform Herculean feats. Who can forget the

firemen laden with life-saving equipment who charged up flights of smoke-filled

stairs in the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks of September 11,

2001? Or the ordinary citizens who carried injured and disabled people out of

the towers? Fight-or-flight responses are appropriate and essential in such

overwhelming situations. When appropriately invoked, the stress response helps

us rise to many challenges. These challenges may be external forces, such as a

fire or an earthquake, or internal threats, such as your circulatory system

teetering on the brink of a deadly collapse. The fight-or-flight response can

prove beneficial under far less dangerous circumstances, too.

Physiologist Hans Selye, whose work helped shape modern stress theory,

advanced the idea that physical and psychosocial stressors trigger the same

physiological response. Selye explored the line between short-term stress that

stimulates people to summon the resources to hurdle obstacles (so-called " good "

stress) and chronic or overabundant stress, which wears down the ability to

adapt and cope ( " bad " stress or distress). Two Harvard researchers, M.

Yerkes and D. Dodson, likewise demonstrated that a jolt of stress isn't

necessarily bad. They noted that as stress or anxiety levels rose, so did

performance and efficiency — up to a point. At this turning point, further

stress and anxiety led to significant decreases in performance and ability.

Where that line is drawn or where that turning point falls seems to differ

from person to person. For while the stress response is hard-wired into humans

and other animals, the events and perceptions that set it off vary widely. What

you perceive as a threatening situation, your neighbor may easily brush aside or

even relish.

From the Harvard Health Publications Special Health Report, Stress Control:

Techniques for Preventing and Easing Stress. Copyright 2002 by the President and

Fellows of Harvard College. Illustrations by Leighton and Marcia .

All rights reserved. Written permission is required to reproduce, in any manner,

in whole or in part, the material contained herein. To make a reprint request,

contact Harvard Health Publications. Used with permission of StayWell.