Good Stress, Bad Stress

I came across this press release ("Well-Being of Workforce Influenced by Employers, Job Duties. Something to Think about on Labor Day: Research Shows a Good Boss Can Help Make Weekdays Feel Like Weekends, but a Bad Boss May Lower Employees' Well-Being") last week on the Healthways website. (Healthways partners with Gallup on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which I'll be writing more about over the next few days).

There's a lot of good material here, but for now I'd like to pick out one paragraph that particularly resonated with me:

Research from the Well-Being Index also reveals that people in a negative work environment are less psychologically resilient and are more vulnerable to stress from economic downturns. Some stress in life is good stress, necessary to motivate through deadlines and often a driver of success. However, people in negative work environments report a high percentage of stress and worry without happiness and enjoyment, a feeling that negatively affects overall well-being.

There are several meaty themes in that paragraph-- pyschological resilience, the concept of "good stress," the role of the work environment in mediating (or aggravating) psychological distress, the measurement of "happiness"-- and I'd like to deal with all of them at some point, but for now (drip, drip, drip), let's stick with just one: the notion that some stress in life is good stress.

There's a great article ("Stress, Definition of Stress, Stressor, What is Stress?, Eustress?") on the website of the American Institue of Stress(AIS) that addresses the notion of "eustress" (good stress). The article's author (who I assume is AIS president Dr Paul Rosch) makes reference to the Human Function Curve, which was first articulated by cardiologist Dr Peter Nixon at least 25 years ago. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to paste images into my blog post, so I'll have to ask you to look at the graphic as it exists on the AIS website (I'm sure Dr Rosch will appreciate the increased click-thru traffic ;-)

The main idea of the Human Function Curve is that a certain amount of stress is beneficial and leads to improved performance and productivity-- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, stress becomes negative and leads to decreased performance and productivity (and increased wear and tear on a person's body, mind, and spirit). So, the challenge is to make sure you stay on the right-hand side of the curve. And the way you do that is by (a) modulating your environment or your response to it, or-- actually: and/or-- (b) improving your capacity-- your resilience, if you will-- and moving the "hump" on the curve further to the right. This latter approach really resonates with me, and in future points I'll elaborate some more on how and why that's the case.