Types of Stress and Why It Can Both Make Us Stronger or Wear Us Down

Two hard months can have very different outcomes. One leads to us being fitter, stronger, and better at whatever it is we’ve been working on. The other ends with us worn thin, sleeping badly, not acting like ourselves, and tired in a way that standard rest doesn’t fix. The workload is the same in both cases, but the effects most definitely are not.

Much of the advice out there is to reduce stress, and most of the time that’s the right approach because chronic stress is a killer. Simultaneously though, stress is also what can lead to adaptation. When we push ourselves just enough (i.e. experience stress), we end up stronger and adjust to the demands placed upon us. Those two versions run through our body in different ways. What separates them has less to do with how hard the experience feels and more to do with how long we experience the stressor, how much control we perceive to have, what it seems to mean, and whether we’re able to rest and recover.

How Stress Makes Us Stronger

Whatever fires in us under pressure was built to get us through something, not to wreck us. When our body reads a situation as a challenge, it sends a surge of energy and narrows attention onto whatever is in front of us. Studies on short-term stress, classified as measurable stress that lasts a few minutes to a few hours, consistently find that it strengthens immune defense instead of suppressing it. 

That’s already a bit backwards from how most of us hear about stress and getting sick, but it makes more sense once we understand what the system is bracing for. This system evolved largely to respond to physical dangers as humans evolved, meaning a fight it assumes will be over shortly. Our stress response still fires in nearly the same way, but the threat is largely perceived threat that’s much harder to turn on and off.

Exercise is one of the cleanest examples of how this works. A hard workout is a controlled event with a clear endpoint that stresses our muscles, mind, and cardiovascular system, leaving behind microscopic muscle damage and other signs of breakdown. In the amounts a workout produces, the breakdown sends us a message, and our body responds by building the muscle back stronger so we meet future workouts better equipped than the last time. That recovery doesn't happen during the workout though; in order to rebuild, the stressor needs to be over.

Why Duration Matters More Than Intensity

The same hard thing usually gets easier around the tenth time we do it because we know what to expect. When a stressor keeps showing up in the same form, our hormonal response to it shrinks. That's the feeling we start to get in the second month of a new job or the tenth time we hit the same interval workout. The stress response diminishes and our body adapts.

That only works though for a stressor that we recognize and have become familiar with. Stress that keeps showing up in different ways or that never quite resolves doesn't get the same treatment. It starts to build up rather than dissipate, meaning our stress response never switches off, yet this can go unnoticed for long periods of time. We might just find ourselves picking up every cold going around, needing three days to feel normal after a hard week instead of one, or struggling to recover from workouts we used to immediately bounce back from.

The Role of Feeling in Control

There's a stark difference between a brutal project we chose to do and a brutal project we were told to do. Most of us can likely feel the difference long before we can explain it. The case where our hand is at least partly on the wheel still leaves us tired but rolling with the punches; when we feel like we’re at the complete mercy of other forces, we can find ourselves exhausted with the life sucked out of us.

Prolonged unpleasant experiences push us towards being passive by default, driven by a region in our brain that actively suppresses attempts to escape. What switches that off is when we detect control, meaning when we notice that our actions are changing, or at least influencing the outcomes. Once we notice this, we start to shake off the passivity. Control isn't really a mood here…it's actually a signal the brain is actively looking for.

Why the Meaning of the Stress Changes Its Effect

Standing backstage with a pounding heart or on the edge of the field before stepping into a game, we can interpret the feeling in two ways, and that interpretation changes our physiology. When people are told that a racing heart and quick breathing are the body getting ready to perform, their cardio response shifts towards taking on the challenge rather than preparing for a threat. The opposite happens when people are told their body is anxious and preparing for retreat. It's the same amount of activation that’s either turned into fuel or converted into poison.

On a longer timeframe, our beliefs about how stress affects us can have some distinct impacts. A large study over eight years found that people who reported a lot of stress and also believed that stress was harming their health had a 43 percent higher risk of dying early. Those who reported a lot of stress yet didn't believe it was harming their health had much lower risk. It's correlational, and belief about stress tangles with actual exposure in ways a survey can't fully pull apart, so it's worth knowing the conclusions are nuanced. Still, it points at something the training world has assumed for a long time, which is that a load carried toward something we want and believe in isn't the same load as one that simply happens to us or is forced upon us.

Why Recovery Decides Which Type of Stress We Get

Anyone who has taken a proper deload week knows that improvement seems to show up while we're doing less. A deliberate overload followed by enough rest produces a short dip in performance and then a step up, while the same overload without the rest produces a longer dip and, eventually, a hole that takes weeks or months to climb out of. Same stimulus both times, just the added ingredient of proper recovery.

The other four factors we touched on point in the same direction too. A stressor that is short, predictable, chosen, and directed at something we care about is one our system can utilize and learn from. A stressor that runs indefinitely, that we can't influence, and that we don’t believe in is one that keeps draining us in the background.

Most of us don't get much say in how much stress gets thrown on our plate. What we sometimes do have a say in though is whether a hard stretch has an end we can see, whether we have any hand in how it goes, and whether there's genuine recovery on the other side of it. We can choose the type of stress we experience.

References

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