Is stress beneficial?

Bre (No)

Stress worsens physical performance and relational desire, lowers emotional control, and promotes disease. Being stressed is unpleasant, unhealthy, and can be pervasive. Abnormal amounts of stress can lead to various mental and physical effects, including high blood pressure, digestive issues, headaches and body aches, anxiety, and depression. How we perceive stressful events determines the severity of their effects. 

Stress negatively impacts a person's sex drive and hormones. It also influences behavioral and developmental issues for children growing in their mothers’ womb. Stress affects mood and behavior, increasing irritation, anger, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. Along with this, stress can also contribute to trouble with memory, focus, and motivation. Harmful stress-related behaviors include unhealthy habits with food and substances, social withdrawal, lack of exercise, and emotional outbursts. Additionally, abnormally stressed individuals are more likely to experience a disability or age prematurely. 

Ongoing stress makes the body more susceptible to illness, worsening existing health issues. It is linked to various and serious health conditions: gastrointestinal and menstrual problems, migraines, insomnia, obesity, mental illness, and more. Chronic stress contributes to life-threatening diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer; even leading can lead to sudden death through heart attacks. Furthermore, stress forces eight of the 12 major body systems to work harder than usual. 

Unwanted stress-related outcomes, such as skin conditions, hair loss, nail damage, and increased fat storage, can ultimately fuel the stress that created them. Stress responses cause serious outcomes like oral damage from teeth-grinding, high blood sugar due to compulsive eating, drug addiction, and fatal accidents.

Stress has numerous harmful and irreversible effects on physical and mental health. While stress may be unavoidable, managing, minimizing, and relieving it is essential.

Andrew (Yes)

Stress generates a fight or flight response to potentially dangerous or threatening situations by putting our bodies in a slightly higher state of alert. This natural response allows us to keep ourselves and others safe in times of danger. There is a reason that stress is so difficult to control—it is a natural instinct that our bodies have developed to ensure that we remain focused in times of emergency. 

Reasonable amounts of stress, such as stage fright, social anxiety, and other forms of performance anxiety, show that we are interested and care about the situations we find ourselves in, whether or not they are expected. While everyone can agree that excessive stress levels can be crippling, we must also recognize that a situation that causes a bit of stress reflects our interest in the outcome of said interaction. When we are hyper-alert of a stressful situation, through stress management, we can use this same stress to improve ourselves and boost our long-term life quality.

The old cliche, 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger,' also applies to stress. Stress has been shown to improve learning capabilities by making students feel challenged, improving efficiency and attention span, and enhancing memory. In other words, our brains better remember and perform during stressful situations, helping us navigate the issue in the future. It is also associated with the increased production of interleukins, which are known to improve immunity. The more our bodies encounter and deal with stress, our baseline functions improve, and we become healthier with or without stress. Stress is an unavoidable part of life. One shouldn't dwell on their present stress level but work on ways to manage and resolve it without letting it derail their work or personal life.