Human Stress: Eustress and Distress
“The body itself cannot physically discern between distress or eustress.”
There are stresses and there are stresses. Your boss yelling at you causes mental distress. Playing chess is mental eustress. Getting a high voltage electric shock is distress for your body and your nervous system. Getting the same nervous system synapses firing by practicing kung-fu is a form of eustress. Then we get into all kinds of other issues. I am fasting right now - seems stressful when your hunger is peaking but its actually a rest day for your digestive system.
Chemically speaking when we speak of stress - one refers to the Adrenocorticotropic hormone and the “Pituitary-Adrenanal System.”
However, I view eustress of ALL kinds as being incredibly beneficial to the over all well being of humans. Take any human system - immune, digestive, nervous, reproductive - you name it and it benefits from eustress. The body has incredibly fine tuned mechanisms for healing and protecting each system. The only time you actually get sick is when these mechanisms are for whatever reason not responding with vigor. And that’s where stress come in. Homeopaths have known this for a very long time:
It is in the shadow of the visible suffering that the hidden treasure of healing can be revealed.
Subdivision of the stress concept has become necessary as more recent work has led to such notions as “eustress,” “distress,” “systemic stress” and “local stress.” Confusion between stress as both an agent and a result can be avoided only by the distinction between “stress” and “stressor.” It is explained that the stress syndrome is — by definition — nonspecific in its causation. However, depending upon conditioning factors, which can selectively influence the reactivity of certain organs, the same stressor can elicit different manifestations in different individuals. —Dr. Hans Selye M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc.
