Is all stress bad? Eustress, distress, and the truth about resilience

[Music] Welcome back to Get Fate Guy, my name's Kevin, and I'm the host. This week I watched a fallacious video on Instagram. I'll tell you about the video, why it was fallacious, and then my take on the message from the video. So yeah, another Instagram guru had posted a video of a plant, which he was trying to grow in a little kind of light box greenhouse type situation. The plant was being watered very regularly and had as much light as it needed to grow. When he came to transfer the plant out of the greenhouse, it toppled over because its roots weren't deep in the soil. The message that he gave from the video was that the plant was weak due to it having a perfect existence. The further message being that bad things are supposed to happen to you in order to make you more resilient. Nice message, but why fallacious? Well, because it's leveraging an informal fallacy called the false comparison or the false equivalence. Humans are humans and plants are plants. It's quite difficult to take a life lessons from a plant and apply it to a human successfully, especially when it's a human interpreting the lesson of the plant. Anyway, some plants also just have shallow roots. Think about crops that you might eat like carrots. They're really close to the surface and you just pull them out by hand. That doesn't make a carrot weak and all organisms adapt to their environment. So the plants in the light box didn't need to grow really deep roots because they were receiving adequate water. This doesn't mean they can't grow deeper roots. What I do agree with though is that adaptation does require stress. All organisms respond to the external environment and people that spend more time in the sun have darker complexions. People that lift weights have bigger muscles and plants that receive more water have shallow roots. This external stress or lack of stress is what drives us to adapt across time. This idea of stress was first included in medical thinking by a Hungarian endocrinologist called Hans Selje in 1936. He defined stress as being the response of the body to any demand. It's important to note though that because stress has mainly negative connotations that not all stress is bad. In fact, there are two main types of stress, use stress and distress. Use stress is the positive form of stress. It's the kind of stress that motivates you and enhances your performance. Like the excitement you feel before a big event like your job interview, maybe your wedding. This type of stress is beneficial because it helps you focus. It can increase your energy and improve performance. Use stress is often linked to feelings of excitement and fulfillment in it's your body's way of helping you rise to a challenge and perform better. On the flip side, we have distress, which is more like the negative form of stress that we often think about when we hear the word. Distress leads to anxiety, poor performance and various health problems. It occurs when stressors are perceived as threats rather than challenges. And chronic distress can lead to serious health issues such as heart disease, depression and a weakened immune system. When we encounter a stressful situation, our bodies undergo a series of physiological changes, sometimes known as the fight or flight response. In this response, first described in the early 20th century, prepares us to either confront or flee from a threat. This involves a release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. While this response is essential for our survival in a moment of emergency, chronic activation can lead to health issues. High levels of these stress hormones across prolonged periods can suppress your immune system, increase your blood pressure and elevate the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Whilst also affecting mental health through anxiety and depression. And in today's fast-paced world, you could probably say stress is almost inevitable due to work pressures, family responsibilities, financial issues with the cost of living, social obligations. These can all contribute to a seemingly endless cycle. The world health organization is called stress, the health epidemic of the 21st century. The widespread prevalence of stress making it crucial for us to understand it better and learn how to manage it more effectively. That could be where things like exercise come in. You might be wondering how exercise fits into the stress conversation. And this is because exercise itself is actually a form of stress. Usually one that falls into the category of "you stress" because it makes us feel better. But when you exercise, you are placing your body of the physical stress, your muscles are working harder, your heart rate increases, your body uses more energy. This type of thing helps us that external stress to build muscle and improve our cardiovascular health and boost our overall fitness. However, when you engage in a workout, it can also push us into a feeling of distress. This is why balance is key. Sometimes if you've had a very stressful day at work, you've had a lot of business decisions to make. Your boss has been giving you a hard time. Your family has been messaging you all day when you're trying to do some work and you've not been able to get back to them and all this kind of stuff. And then you go into the gym and you're confronted with very, very loud high beat per minute music and you're just pushing your body to red line in a competitive kind of class environment. That is a situation of distress. So absolutely balance is key. If you do enjoy that kind of high intensity training environment and you do have a stressful job or life also, make sure you're incorporating rest days to allow your body to recover so that you don't fall further into the trap of distress. Learning how to listen to your body and adjusting workout intensity could also be very useful for you, although can be hard in a class environment, right? Because how do you turn around and say to someone that's screaming at you to move faster like, yo, can you take a chill pill please? I'm adjusting my workout intensity. Doesn't really work. Anyway, given the inevitable presence of stress in our lives, you know, it's good to have some techniques that can help and manage to reduce the stress. Regular physical activity, as just as the gust is a great way to manage stress, it can release bill of tension and promotes the release of endorphins. Mindfulness and meditation practices, these can help to calm your mind and reduce the physiological effects of stress by putting you into state of relaxation, which can counteract the stress response. Make sure you're getting adequate sleep, which is crucial for stress management, because this is where the body repairs itself and your mind processes the day's events. Like of sleep can exacerbate your stress and make it harder to cope with daily challenges. Healthy diet is really important because nutrition plays a significant role in how your body handles stress. Balance diet can help to regulate your hormones, which will help to provide better energy for you to cope with stresses. Having social support is really important, that could be something you get through the gym, but also just connecting with friends and family can help to provide emotional support in a sense of belonging both of which are vital for managing stress. Time management can be really important, organizing and prioritizing tasks can help to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. Breaking tasks into manageable steps and setting realistic goals can make stress more manageable, and I'll be doing an episode on better decision-making and time management soon. So stay tuned for that. And professional help, don't forget that sometimes stress can be overwhelming and that YouTube isn't a professional resource. So make sure that you hook up with some therapy or mental health professionals because they can always give you some strategies for supporting and managing your stress effectively. And also just remember that your perception does play a big role in this too because viewing stress is a challenge to yourself, rather than some kind of massive threat. Well, have an impact on how your body responds to it. And this shift in your own perspective can transform this stress into you stress, making it more motivating, rather than debilitating. Stress is inevitable as part of your life. And whilst, as I said, chronic distress can have serious health implications, you stress can enhance our performance and well-being. Exercise, whilst being physically stressful exemplifies how stress can be beneficial when properly managed and understanding the differences between the different types of stress, recognizing the physiological impact, stress and employing some effective stress management strategies can help you to navigate the challenges of modern life. Have a balanced approach and view stress as a motivator rather than a constant threat. And you can definitely see a more positive impact on your health and well-being. If you have any questions or just want to say hi, please email me, get fit guy quick in dirty tips.com, quick and dirty tips.com and get fit guy. Have a great team, Morgan Christiansen, Holly Hutchins, Browning Getchist, Divina Tomlin, me. If you have a question, send a voicemail to 510-3533-104 or send me an email at get fit guy quick in dirty tips.com for more information about the show, visit quick in dirty tips.com or check out the show notes in your podcast. [MUSIC]