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When it comes to stress, people tend to think that any and all stress is a bad thing. However, that’s not inherently true. A little bit of stress can be helpful – it’s what drives you to improve and helps you feel pressured to do good things or get out of a bad situation.
However, too much stress causes you to develop bad habits, and can leave you open to a number of mental and physical problems. There are two forms of stress, and they’re not referred to very often.
First, you have distress, which is what you normally associate with stress. This is anything negative, such as being fired from a job and trying to figure out how to get by. Distress isn’t really good in any way.
On the other hand, there’s something called eustress, which is the good kinds of stress. Eustress could mean anything positive that just happens to put pressure on you. This could be something like getting a promotion at your job.
You’re happy to get the promotion, but you know that you’re soon going to have greater responsibilities, meaning that you’re going to feel pressured to work even harder than you normally do.
Eustress, in moderate amounts, is what you want to have so that you’re driven and motivated. If you’re experiencing eustress, then you’re going to feel almost excited to tackle your new problems.
It’s something that you know is going to be a challenge, but it’s by no means outside of your skillset. You know that it’s possible to overcome it, but it’ll take a bit of effort. This feeling can actually affect your performance and help you do better than you normally would.
Distress has no positive benefits to it whatsoever. It causes you to feel anxious, and can even lead to things like depression. This is the type of stress that can put you in a panic, and can make you either do a poor job on something or can make you avoid it for as long as possible.
Distress stems from inherently negative experiences that you might go through, and if left unchecked, it can quickly take over and overload you. Keep your stress levels balanced out.
If you let too much distress in your life, you’ll start to feel the negative effects of it pretty quickly, which can lead to plenty of complications. Focus your efforts on things that challenge you, but are within reason.