Stress isn't all bad. Here's when it can help

No one gets a free pass when it comes to stress. We all experience it, and though chronic stress can take its toll on our health, there are situations when stress can be beneficial.

Ever felt clammy palms or butterflies in your stomach? In the moments before you walk into a job interview, ask someone out on a date, or step up to a podium to speak to a crowd, your stress response can kick in and create these physical sensations.

Dan Harris, host of the podcast 10% Happier, recalls a case of the jitters before a recent TV appearance. He felt his heart rate pick up. “In the seconds before I went on I was pacing around,” he says, feeling nervous.

And the outcome? “The appearance went great.” Harris says he’s come to interpret some of the physiological aspects of stress as a good thing. “There’s an empowering inner jujitsu move,” he says, to reframe stress.

“Instead of telling yourself that you’re having crippling anxiety, you can tell yourself a more empowering story, which is, I’m excited!” he says.

Your stress response can be your body’s way of preparing to rise to a challenge, explains Jeremy Jamieson, a psychologist at the University of Rochester. He studies how stress responses can be “optimized.”

“We’re not passive receivers of stress,” Jamieson explains. “We’re active agents in actually making our own stress response.”

Jamieson says the stress we feel during challenging situations can give us fuel to address the demands we face. For instance, as your heart rate increases, it can help deliver more oxygen to your brain and muscles.

“Oxygen is very good for helping us process information quickly,” Jamieson explains. It can also help people perform.

Humans have long faced threats from predators, and our fight-or-flight response evolved to help us survive these dangers. But the kinds of stressors we face today have shifted. In modern times, some of our stress comes from challenges that Jamieson says can be viewed as “growth opportunities.” The job interview, the presentation, the TV appearance.

“To really innovate and do hard things, your stress response is there to optimize your performance,” he says.

When it comes to stress, “context matters,” says researcher Wendy Berry Mendes, a professor of psychology at Yale University. There are different types of stress responses and different types of stress.

She points to studies from Scandinavia, going back decades, that found stress hormones are linked to better performance in students taking tests.

“A greater increase in catecholamines, [including] epinephrine, norepinephrine, the morning of the test was associated with better performance on that test,” she says.

But here’s the challenge: Not everyone responds to stressors in the same way. Test anxiety is real for some people and it can work against their performance. Part of the equation is how well they know the material, or how well prepared they are to take the test. Another part is how they perceive stress.

Jamieson points to evidence that people can be taught to “reappraise” stress. He and collaborators studied community college students who were preparing for a math test. When students were given information about the “functional benefits” of stress before the test, they did better.

“By informing people of the benefits of stress responses in these settings, they latched on to the idea, I can lean into my stress, “ Jamieson says, and use it to help do important things.

The students who were taught to “reappraise their stress as a resource,” not only performed better they had less text anxiety.

When good stress turns bad

So, when stress arises from a challenge or opportunity, it can be helpful in the moment. But, when your stress response stays activated during times you don’t need it, this becomes problematic.

Let’s say you have a big presentation, that’s still three days away. You’ve finished the preparations, but anticipatory stress sets in. Just imagining yourself giving the presentation gives you jitters. You can feel a stress response amp up.

Your breath is shallow, or you feel edgy or irritated. If you use a wearable, such as an Oura ring or Apple Watch, it may show a low level of heart rate variability, which is indicative of more time in stress mode.

“Your body is going into overdrive before you need it,” Mendes says. And this can exhaust your physiological system. “Imagine if you were sprinting across the savannah, trying to run away from a lion,” Mendes says, but the lion isn’t showing up for three days! That isn’t sustainable.

It’s also unhelpful to fret about a performance after it’s over. “Your body no longer needs to be in overdrive,” Mendes says, but worrying keeps the stress response activated.

This can lead to fatigue, moodiness and burnout. Chronic stress can make you feel as if you’re continually under attack. It’s linked to everything from an increased risk in heart disease to depression, headaches and sleep troubles.

All of this suggests that strategies to manage stress are key. We can’t avoid the tough situations life throws at us, but we can learn skills that boost our ability to manage and even bounce back and thrive.

Stress Less editors are Carmel Wroth and Jane Greenhalgh