The stress response—the body’s hormonal reaction to danger, uncertainty or change—evolved to help us survive, and if we learn how to keep it from overrunning our lives, it still can. In the short term, it can energize us, “revving up our systems to handle what we have to handle,” says Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at UCLA. In the long term, stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient. Even when it’s extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. “There’s really a biochemical and scientific bias that stress is bad, but anecdotally and clinically, it’s quite evident that it can work for some people,” says Orloff. “We need a new wave of research with a more balanced approach to how stress can serve us.” Otherwise, we’re all going to spend far more time than we should stressing ourselves out about the fact that we’re stressed out.
In the past several years, a lot of us have convinced ourselves that stress is unequivocally negative for everyone, all the time. We’ve blamed stress for a wide variety of problems, from slight memory lapses to full-on dementia—and that’s just in the brain. We’ve even come up with a derisive nickname for people who voluntarily plunge into stressful situations: they’re “adrenaline junkies.”
If you aren’t already paralyzed with stress from reading the financial news, here’s a sure way to achieve that grim state: read a medical-journal article that examines what stress can do to your brain. Stress, you’ll learn, is crippling your neurons so that, a few years or decades from now, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will have an easy time destroying what’s left. That’s assuming you haven’t already died by then of some other stress-related ailment such as heart disease. As we enter what is sure to be a long period of uncertainty—a gantlet of lost jobs, dwindling assets, home foreclosures and two continuing wars—the downside of stress is certainly worth exploring. But what about the upside? It’s not something we hear much about.
