When people use the word “stress”, many people perceive the negative connotation of the word, attempting to avoid the feeling at all costs. While it is true that too much stress can be extremely detrimental to a person’s mental health, stress is actually extremely important in our everyday lives and an essential catalyst of productivity and success.
Motivation and Productivity
As stated before in my blog “Is Procrastination a Problem?”, stress can actually help increase productivity. The Yerkes-Dodson Law Curve supports this fact, with a diagram that stress is important when there is balance.
The Yerkes-Dodson Curve is a bell shaped curve that shows the relationship between stress level (otherwise known as arousal in some diagrams) and performance. As seen above, too much stress can hinder a person, causing severe anxiety and the inability to properly perform. However, low levels of stress can also negatively impact a person’s performance, causing them to not put in the work to do their best. An example of this occurrence is understudying for a test, whether it be due to lack of motivation or overconfidence. Stress gives us the push we need to try our best when preparing for and performing a task, allowing us to achieve what we may set out to accomplish.
Stress not only helps with motivation to complete assigned tasks, it can also improve your overall skill. According to Medical News Today’s article “Stress may have some important cognitive benefits, new study suggests” by Jennifer Huizen, “Stress causes a release of epinephrine that makes it easier to do tasks and enhances performance and problem-solving skills”. Stress, adrenaline, and epinephrine enhance brain activity, which allows for this increase in skill and the ability to better achieve what the individual sets out to accomplish.
Health and our Immune System
While many people know about how stress improves cognitive function, that is not the only thing stress does for us. Surprisingly, stress can also help us physically. Healthline helps provide some insight on this fact in the article “Good Stress: What Are the Benefits?”, telling us that “Moderate stress stimulates the production of a chemical called interleukins and gives the immune system a quick boost to protect against illnesses”. Interleukins can help to prevent illnesses such as the cold and flu, two diseases that, while not considered dangerous, can negatively impact our mental and physical state and decrease our ability to be productive. Good health is extremely important, and although too much anxiety can hurt our wellbeing, with the right amount of stress, we can continue to stay healthy and happy.
Of course, we must be cautious of over stress in our everyday lives. As mentioned before in other blogs, being too anxious can lead to severe physical and mental problems in both the short and long term. Over stress is known to increase the risk of mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, and many other impairments. Not only this, but stress can harm a person’s physical health as well, as it can lead to high blood pressure, hearth problems, and a weakened immune system. Healthline continues to help us understand stress in the article “Nine Ways Stress Is More Dangerous Than You Think” by Brian Krans as he tells us that “Stress has been linked to illnesses that include cancer, lung disease, fatal accidents, suicide, and cirrhosis of the liver”.
Stress can be both extremely helpful and detrimental to our lives. For this reason, it is important to help maintain a moderate, healthy amount of stress, allowing us to increase our productivity and health without the risk of harming our mental and physical health.