What is the difference between good and bad stress and how can we learn to cope with the bad stress
Good and Bad Stress
Millions of people around the world suffer from anxiety disorders and for those of us who do, anxiety plays a huge part in our lives. We try everything we can think of to overcome anxiety. Medication, relaxation techniques, therapy; but finally there may be light at the end of the tunnel as new research has shown that some types of stress are actually good for us.
New research has shown that anxiety may actually be good for us. What we have thought of as the bane of our lives can not only be beneficial to us but can actually help us succeed in our endeavours, giving us a foot up in our quest to reach the top.
Without a certain level of anxiety we could easily settle into mediocrity. What scientists in the USA have discovered is that there are actually two different types of anxiety. One is called challenge stress (good stress) and the other is called threat stress (bad stress). The first helps us to achieve, the second, is the stress that will undo us and lead to anxiety disorders.
We might believe that anxiety is a modern condition but without anxiety our ancestors would not have moved out of the caves. Without the natural caution that anxiety gives us we are unlikely to have survived as a species. In simple terms; fear causes our anxiety to soar, producing adrenaline which increases our breathing, speeds up our hearts and gets us ready for fight or flight. Without it our ancestors would have quickly become the next meal for a hungry predator.
Worry, anxiety or simply being scared (whatever you call it) makes the hypothalamus (part of the brain) tell the pituitary gland to release a hormone. This hormone tells the adrenal gland to start working,, which it does, sending adrenaline coursing through our blood stream, sending our internal systems into overdrive.
Our heart rate soars, our breathing increases, blood vessels shut down in our extremities. So anxiety can be good for us because when adrenaline is pumping around our veins we are at peak performance, faster, sharper and more focused than at any other time.
You only need to look at top athletes to understand this. A 100m sprinter in the blocks is pumped up with adrenaline, poised to outperform the competition. So anxiety is essential to avoid just meandering through life contentedly ignoring any challenge.
This is good stress, this is challenge stress.
Where the problems start is if the anxiety doesn’t lead to action. If our bodies are unable to fulfil the challenge which has led to anxiety then it can lead to physical and psychiatric damage.
At this point stress stops doing the job it was designed for and becomes counter productive; this is when anxiety leads to long term irrational fear. This is the long term stress that can leave us feeling like a rabbit trapped in the headlights, this is the crippling type of anxiety. This is threat stress (bad stress)
It is fairly easy to tell which type of stress you are experiencing. If you are in a situation that excites you and the feeling passes as the situation changes then you are experiencing challenge stress. One example might be the excitement that you feel on being invited somewhere new.
If on the other hand, that invitation leads to a sleepless night, to worrying about the situation, over-preparation and anxiety about how you come across then you are almost definitely experiencing threat stress.
The research has shown that the second type of stress, threat stress is as a result of a chemical imbalance that has become ingrained. It is now believed that people who suffer from anxiety have a constant activation of the fear response, the hypothalamus-pituitary adrenal axis (to give it its scientific name). We are unable to switch off the bad response, the over-reaction to stress.
The reason why some of us go through life suffering constant anxiety whilst others just breeze along is that we have been programmed to over-react to stressful situations. People who were abused as children or suffered some type of trauma are far more likely to be anxious later in life. It’s programming, it’s a learned experience, almost a forging of synapses within the brain.
But here’s the good news…the light at the end of the tunnel. If programming and life experience has taught us to be anxious, if we have been programmed to respond in a certain way to stress and anxiety, then we can be reprogrammed.
It’s not easy and it is unlikely to be quick but by modifying our behaviour we can learn to deal with stress differently, we can reprogram our brains and switch off our automatic over-reaction to stress.
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