No, You Don’t Want a Stress-Free Life

Short remarks on the nature of stress

[Created with DALL-E]

Colloquially, people want to live ‘stress-free’. But this sentiment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about what stress truly is.

To understand stress, let’s use the example of weight lifting. When a person lifts weights, they subject their muscles to stress. And in fact, this kind of stress is the original meaning of the word, which precedes its use in psychology: the strain that the force of one body exerts on another.

Now, is the stress of weight lifting a bad thing? Of course not. The stress literally breaks apart muscle fibers, but with adequate rest and nutrition, they grow back even stronger. And the accompanying increase in lean mass supports many metabolic functions and is protective against disease.

Imagine a person who refrains from lifting weights on the basis that they don’t want to be stressed — that they don’t want to subject their muscles to stress. This would only be an unhelpful and unnecessary pathologization of stress, that would deprive them of all the benefits of lean muscle mass.

This example shows how stress can be eustress: namely, stress that has a positive, adaptive function.

To further explore this difference between stress and eustress, let’s use another…