Good Stress or Bad?

Facing the Day

Positive Stress: By facing any situation with enough excitement to override fear, you can avoid negative stress.

Negative Stress: Occurs when a situation is faced with a mixture of dread, worry, and anxiety.

Tough Schedules

Positive Stress: Ensure that positive stress is a part of your routine by allowing your filled-to-the-brim schedule to contain several activities you find satisfying and look forward to doing.  

Negative Stress: You're sure to experience negative stress if you have an overloaded schedule stuffed with obligations that you don’t enjoy and would not fulfill if you had a choice.

Commitments

Positive Stress: Sometimes it's tough to balance all of your commitments. The trick is to pick the right ones. Whether it's being a wife, husband, parent, president or valued employee, make sure that your commitment list contains things that you would never want to give up completely, even though you may feel overwhelmed.

Negative Stress:  When you feel that your commitments are unimportant, unfulfilling, and not worth the effort, negative stress will occur as a result.

Setting Goals

Positive Stress: Working toward a valued goal and knowing that life will slow down once you achieve it. In this case, positive stress presents itself as motivation and drive to accomplish your set goals.

Negative Stress: Without a goal, people often feel out of control and overwhelmed with no end in sight and no help on the horizon.

Tackling Tasks

Positive Stress: By addressing tasks with positive stress, people tend to feel challenged, alert, and energetic - primed to tackle the task at hand, whatever it may be.

Negative Stress: Meanwhile, those who allow negative stress to dominate their lives often feel as though they want to crawl under the covers and stay there rather than take a stab at the task at hand.

Sleeping Patterns

Positive Stress: People who live their lives with positive stress tend to experience a good kind of tired; one which allows them to feel fulfilled enough to get a restful, deep sleep.

Negative Stress: Contrarily, people who experience too much negative stress often have restless sleeps, ulcers, back pain, or recurrent minor illnesses which simply add to their level of negative stress. A proper sleep pattern is extremely important for stress management.

Now that you have an understanding of the difference between good and bad stress, try to find the perfect balance in your life by becoming more aware of your reactions and behaviour on a daily basis.