How Stress Can Make You Stronger
You didn’t know stress was good for you, until now
January 23, 2025
Being stressed out sucks, but it turns out your body is pretty good at adapting to it…. Mostly.
A good analogy is lifting weights, which is technically physical stress. When you lift weights, you create lots of little tears in your muscles. That seems bad, but those small tears cue your body to grow the muscles stronger.
If you over do it, you could tear the whole muscle off, which is obviously unhealthy (and so gross don’t google “powerlifter tears off bicep”).
But, if you don’t lift weights at all, your muscles will get weaker over time.
There are 3 types of Psychological or Psychosocial Stress (aka the type of stress in your brain) [1].
Distress is stress that’s so severe it causes damage or even disease. Both mentally (by damaging brain processes and pathways), and physically (through cell damage).
It’s the equivalent of tearing off your bicep cause you put too much weight on the bar.
Eustress is manageable and makes you stronger. It sucks in the moment, but you learn to work through it which makes you stronger in the end.
It’s like a good leg day. You hate yourself in the moment, but thunder thighs don’t build themselves.
Sustress is a lack of stress. Without stressors, you get sensitive.
It’s like when you stop working out. Your muscles get weaker. Without any stress, you lose the ability to cope.
There is some debate about how the difference between Eustress and Distress. Some neuroscientists argue that over time, everything makes you stronger if you learn from it. So, technically everything is eventually Eustress [2].
Why does this happen?
2 Concepts to Understand:
Your body and brain are constantly trying to achieve Homeostasis. Every time your environment throws something at you (we call that a stimulus) your body deals with to get back to balance.
If Homeostasis is Balance, then Homeostatic Buffering Capacity is a measure of how much you can take before getting knocked off balance.
Similar to the muscles getting stronger when used, your Buffering Capacity increases as you deal with stress.
A larger Buffering Capacity, means it takes more to knock you off balance.
Mental Toughness is like a Pirate Ship. A tough ship can take on storms and waves and sea monsters - and still sail ahead. A sensitive ship sinks as soon as it gets out of the harbor.
We want to avoid sinking, the same way we want to avoid spiraling out when we get hit with stress.
But, remembering that stress can make you stronger... might make you see stress in a new way.
Ronnie Coleman got stoked about leg day. You can get stoked on a little stress.
Not all stress is bad. Embrace stress, and get mentally tougher. Avoid stress, and stay sensitive.
Keep crushing it
Carl
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