By Michael Kastelnik, PsyD — Stress is a common experience for all of us. It is the result of stressors, which are the events that lead to our stress response, which, at its worst, can lead to panic, illness, and impaired judgement. However, there are other ways of viewing stress. In fact, the word “eustress” denotates a positive form of stress, in contrast to the undesirable “distress.” In everyday language, eustress is rarely mentioned while distress is typically reserved for psychotherapy circles to describe when someone’s mental health is hurt badly enough for him or her to seek treatment. Plain stress covers most other situations and is typically viewed as undesirable. The phrase “stress relief” implies that stress is bad and akin to something like physical pain. But pain, even psychological pain, has its advantages. We benefit from learning to not touch a flame after we get burned. We should feel sad when our relatives pass away in order to face the reality that someone special has been taken from us. The experience of feeling sick when we have an infection is typically from our own immune systems taking steps to fight the infection. With the latter example, stress relief would be the equivalent of immune-suppressing treatment. So maybe eliminating stress entirely is not the best approach.
The most interesting stories involve some conflict that needs to be resolved. Many of the best musical compositions are the same way, typically even including some dissonance that in itself can be displeasing to our ears. The tension in these works of art creates an anticipation of restoration of peace that is satisfied if we endure to the end of the story or the musical work. We could argue that some tension is even somewhat necessary for great works of art, but it needs to be moderate and balanced in relation to the rest of the work as a whole.
The Yerkes-Dodson curve is a visual demonstration of this relationship between arousal and productivity, at least in a workplace context. Initially, productivity increases as arousal, or stress, increases, but after a certain point the relationship inverts and productivity decreases as stress increases. This indicates that in order to maximize productivity we need an optimal and moderate amount of stress. This relationship seems to hold true in other situations than the employment, such as with sports, driving, education or even prayer.
Some of the happiest and most eventful moments in life, such as graduations, marriages and the birth of children, are accompanied by significant stress. You typically don’t have to make great efforts to pay attention during these moments. But how do you deal with everyday situations that don’t naturally evoke arousal? You could decide to apply more care, concern and interest towards a topic. If you are wondering how to increase the likelihood of caring about something more than you are currently inclined, you can simply remind yourself that people — that includes you — respond to incentives. One universally understood manifestation of incentives is called the pleasure principle — the idea that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. You can take advantage of this natural incentive structure. For example, if you tend to procrastinate on your taxes, you schedule a weekday well in advance of the deadline to file them. If you accomplish the task, you could reward yourself with a pleasurable pastime such as playing a game (the carrot), and if you don’t accomplish the task, you could have a painful consequence of scheduling a precious Saturday to do your taxes plus some other chore (the stick). Of course, this is in addition to subtler rewards such as the satisfaction of doing a duty and punishments such as living with the anxiety of being that much more likely to experience a tax audit.
The bottom line is that stress is a necessary force in life, a resource. Like managers with the employees in a company, you can respect this resource and use it to help enable yourself to better accomplish everything else you want and need to do in life, assuming it is in accord with the will of Almighty God.
