At its most basic level, stress is a response to change.
Some stress can be a good thing. When you walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, for example, you “stress” your leg muscles – and when they recover they will be a little stronger. Your leg muscles become more resilient because they were stressed.
Similarly, within a normal range, struggling and successfully learning how to cope helps us get a little stronger mentally. In fact, humans don’t tend to do very well in stress-free, happy, Utopian environments. They get bored and depressed and things start getting weird.
Taking a stress-free vacation is great, but you don’t really want to live a “stress free” life. That may be hard to believe right now but it’s true.
Living a life without stress would be like being an astronaut living in zero gravity for too long. Without the “stress” of gravity, muscles atrophy and things start to fall apart. We need some stress in our lives in order to learn, grow and thrive – a fact that happiness experts point to as the whole point of living.
Successfully coping with stress makes us more psychologically resilient. It’s that simple.
Of course, the opposite is also true. More stress doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. Overwhelming stress is… well, overwhelming. Too much stress for too long and things start to fall apart.
For millions of years, humans and our remote ancestors have been engaged in a struggle to survive and adapt in an ever-changing environment. Through the process of natural selection, our bodies have been equipped with a system for maximizing arousal and creating the energy we need to survive “life or death” situations. This included physical dangers like hunting dangerous animals, escaping predators that wanted to eat us and dealing with other humans who wanted to do us harm.
Remember that any changes in the environment around us, by definition, produce “stress.” But the kinds of changes that produce the most stress are those that are novel, unpredictable, uncertain, threatening or dangerous. COVID-19 and all of the other changes that go with it are a very stressful situation for most people.
If you’re struggling, you can access our therapy programs by visiting our Virtual Mental Health Therapy Clinic. If you are part of our Workplace Mental Health Program, please visit your company page for access to services covered by your workplace. We’re only a few clicks away.