Good stress vs. bad stress

Stress tends to get a bad rap. But is all stress bad? And more importantly, what exactly is stress?

The best way to describe stress is ‘our response to external challenges’. It’s the way your mind and body prepares to successfully meet a challenge or demand. Generally, the greater the challenge, the greater the stimulation.

The purpose of this stimulating response is to activate and enliven all your capabilities so you can rise to the challenge, whether it be at work, studying, in a relationship, playing sport, or being creative.

This kind of stress that stimulates all your higher capabilities is called healthy stress. Healthy stress causes you to grow and become more skilled, confident and competent. Healthy stress however, can quickly turn unhealthy when you don’t give yourself enough time to rest and recover.

When there’s too much external stimulation, we can become overwhelmed and our brain detects danger and activates the ‘fight or flight’ response. This level of stimulation causes a dramatic transformation in the mind and body that enables you to either fight or flee to survive an immediate threat.

Now this response is great if you’re faced with a life-threatening situation. However, most of the time the fight or flight response is being triggered in non-life-threatening situations. And this has a huge impact on your behaviour and capability to creatively respond to challenges and demands. Instead of being confident and competent, you become reactive and defensive. This is when healthy stress becomes unhealthy stress. 

If you continue to experience high levels of stress and fatigue without resting and recovering, it quickly begins to have a huge impact on your mental and physical wellbeing. Some obvious signs that healthy stress is becoming unhealthy are:

•    Anxiousness or worry about the past or future

•    Emotionally reactive, argumentative, or defensive

•    Feelings of heaviness and lack of motivation

•    Negative, pessimistic or overly judgmental

•    A constantly racing and darting mind, difficult to stay present and focused

•    Struggling to perform tasks because you are too tired

•    Always in a rush, not fully completing tasks

•    Unable to listen to other perspectives

•    Poor sleep.

The key to maintaining balance in life is to recognise when healthy stress is turning unhealthy, and to do something about it, before it starts to have a negative impact on your health and wellbeing.

Rest is the best antidote for stress, and meditation is a great way to get it. The 1 Giant Mind ‘Being’ meditation technique triggers what is known as the ‘relaxation response.’ The relaxation response is the opposite of fight or flight and when triggered, causes the mind and body to rest deeply. This allows you to rapidly recover from stress and fatigue and increases your resilience, vitality and overall wellbeing.

Making meditation a daily habit is an effective and practical way to stay on top of your stress levels. The outcome is that you enjoy life more, feel greater confidence and competence in meeting life’s challenges and don’t sweat the small stuff as much.