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What Can You Do When Stress is Everywhere? — 2 Comments

  1. While too much stress is not good, we need some stress to grow etc. What I mean by that is you cannot strengthen muscles or increase aerobic capacity unless you create some small stress that motivates the muscles and lungs to increase capacity. Of course, too much stress is counterproductive in fitness training and results in muscle breakdown so you have to know what you are doing. Mental stress such as is brought on by competition or learning is also good to a certain extent – by challenging ourselves to learn a skill, a language or to compete in a word game or card game we create an arousal response which helps us focus. Again, there is too much stress and arousal level gets high, performance and/or learning suffer. What I am attempting to communicate is stress is a necessary and important part of being alive; too much stress is detrimental. Personally, I find writing lists a huge help as it gets it out of my head and onto paper and I can get a thrill checking it off or deciding I didn’t need to do that anyway. And, of course, constructive rest is a great help to relive stress. The stress of family difficulties like health problems is not good and anything we can do to alleviate it in a healthy way is really beneficial.

    • Thank you, Judith, for this thoughtful response. You are indeed right that not all stress is “bad.” I guess there is a tipping point at which healthy stress becomes unhealthy, and it is that sort of stress I was writing about here.

      By the way, I am also a list-writer – it helps me no end. I can’t imagine trying to keep everything in my head!!

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