I want to write about something I came across a while ago. It is a word I wasn’t familiar with.  Not in a text sense anyway. The truth though is I had benefited from this new word discovery for years. We all have. And the word, Eustress.

The book Be Like the Best (Anthony Renna) lead me to the concept of eustress.

Eustress is the opposite of distress. If you were to look up the definition of eustress this is what you’d find:

A positive form of stress that has a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and emotional well-being.

Distress, a word we are all familiar with, is the negative consequence of stress, while eustress is the positive consequence of stress.

Eustress is the concept of stress making us stronger. For example, exercise elicits a eustress response to stress…exercise makes us stronger, fitter, and healthier. Without the stress of exercise, there are no improvements.

The important thing is the stress dose. While stress is normally seen as a bad thing this is only true in large doses or doses where it becomes distress. The truth is that we need stress to make positive gains in anything we do…stress is what makes us adapt in the positive, for betterment. Without some stress, there are no improvements.