Written by Brandon Grentz
If you’re anything like me, you’ve heard statistics about stress and how we need to avoid it due to the damage it can cause our bodies. However, all the statistics and all the warnings do anything but give me peace.
In fact, most conversations surrounding stress cause me more stress, which makes me feel stressed, and I stress over the amount of stress I feel.
It can be easy to look at our lives at work or school and feel overwhelmed by the number of things we need to do, people we need to interact with, homework we need to get done and time we seem to be lacking. So, let’s take a deep breath and dive into this topic to gain some clarity.
First off, what is stress? The National Institute of Mental Health defines stress as the physical or mental response to external causes. These stressors can be one-time occurrences or repeating occurrences. They can be short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic). Simply put, stress is our body’s way of responding to things around us.
Is all stress bad for our physical and mental health? Positive stress, or eustress, is actually helpful. Eustress occurs when we have a positive experience; it could be an adrenaline rush when snowboarding down a mountain or getting good work in before a deadline. These short bursts of adrenaline and cortisol can energize you and create focus when needed for appropriate tasks and situations.
Negative stress is typically long-term, or chronic, stress because our responses to stress are meant for survival and only when needed. Prolonged stress keeps these levels of cortisol and adrenaline for much longer than they are intended to last.
So how can we keep our stress levels in check to keep them from becoming unhealthy? There are two main ways to keep our stress in check. The first way is to control the aspects of our environment that we have control over. This might look like adjusting our schedules to allow for breaks, choosing friendships that encourage us, sticking to a schedule to meet deadlines or maybe even cutting back on work hours if needed.
If there are aspects of your environment that you cannot move or control, the second way to attack stress is to evaluate your responses to it. We can cope better with stress by looking at our perceptions of situations that affect us. Many times the way we interpret an outside event has much more effect on us than the event itself. Try on different perspectives of things and see which one is most helpful to you. Other ways to take care of your stress are to get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly and lean on your friends and family for social support.
If you are having trouble with chronic stress, especially in daily functioning, feel free to reach out to us here at the counseling center or reach out to a friend, family member or trusted individual.
Life can be stressful, but let’s put more eustress into it rather than chronic stress, which is detrimental to our health. Go for a hike, race a mountain bike down a hill, explore places with friends and turn that homework in with plenty of time left on the clock.