The feeling of your heart racing before a test, not being able to sleep the night before a big event, or your hands shaking before a big game are symptoms that most people recognize are caused by stress — something we often dread, as it usually leaves us with an unpleasant feeling.

But what if I tell you that this feeling is actually helping you?

Stress is our mind and body’s response to pressures, challenges, threats, or simply being overworked — which triggers something known as the “flight-or-fight” response.

While this response can be harmful, it can also help us, motivate us, and improve our overall mental and physical performance. 

Good stress, also known as eustress, is a form of short-term stress characterized as manageable, motivating, and satisfactory. Eustress helps to promote mental and physical health as well as personal growth, as it often results in feelings of accomplishment and positivity.

Eustress is less common to come across, as many people don’t know how to transform their stress into it — or are even aware that it exists.

On the other hand, bad stress, as you can imagine, has negative effects such as harming our wellbeing and holding us back from our day-to-day lives. This type of stress, also known as distress, is a form of chronic, long-term stress known for causing many harmful physical and mental symptoms by keeping the body in a state of stress for too long. 

Symptoms of distress can include exhaustion, anxiety, depression, sleep issues, headaches, difficulty concentrating, body aches, and much more.

It’s very clear that any of these serious repercussions can have a detrimental effect on school or regular life.

As a freshman in high school, stress is an inevitable force that can’t be avoided, and coming from a middle school that didn’t assign much homework makes it even harder. I was so used to coming home from school and studying with no homework due the next day.

One week toward the beginning of the school year, I was loaded with assignments and several tests to study for. On top of that, I had soccer practice too.

The workload felt unmanageable, bringing on high levels of stress that, instead of motivating me, led to procrastination.

As the due dates and summative assessments got closer, I found myself staying up late and doing my work instead of using my time wisely and working against the pressure inflicted by my stress. The lack of sleep took a toll on my daily life, something I noticed very quickly during times I needed to focus and get into “school-mode.”

When the next stressful week came, I reflected on my procrastination, motivated by the memories of the past week, and didn’t make the same mistakes again. I used that stress to boost me and fuel me to do that work, which ultimately caused me to realize that there is another side of stress: eustress.

I used the adrenaline that comes with stress to take action and make a change in the way I managed my workload from school. Thinking — more so knowing — that stress is something that can empower me made me realize I can use it to my advantage.

Thinking of stress as something helpful in life rather than something detrimental can change how your body responds to it.

Viewing stress as problematic or dangerous can lead someone to cope with it in an unhealthy way — whether it’s as simple as procrastination, or something even worse. This can lead to even more problems in the future, including distress.

But if you view it as something beneficial, coping can mean tackling the source of stress or finding help to do so. When this becomes a habit, your mind will default to eustress mode.

Recognizing this difference is only the first step.

The real goal is to be able to make this change happen — learning how to use stress as a tool instead of something to be avoided at all costs. 

In reality, stress is something unavoidable that comes with school and life, and trying to eliminate or avoid it is unrealistic. Instead, we should focus on developing the way we process stress so our responses become beneficial.

When stress is viewed correctly, it can serve as a way to take action, meet challenges head on, and stay focused. This shift is essential because the way we process and complete things depends on how stress is handled.

Although stress is a normal part of life, too much can be a problem.

When in a state of stress, the body releases cortisol, a hormone that essentially gets rid of or slows functions that aren’t essential during moments of intense stress. While this can be helpful when needed, having cortisol present at all times keeps the body and mind in a flight-or-fight state.

This state is what causes bad stress and brings in the negative effects of stress.

To keep these effects from happening, we all need moments of rest and rejuvenation. Planning specific times to rest, completing homework during classtime, and simply keeping a schedule are all ways to do this. 

A healthy amount of stress and thinking of stress as something beneficial is what specifically makes it eustress.

Rather than seeing stress as something that holds us back, we should learn to use it as something that will push us forward and play to our benefit.

So, the next time you feel stressed, pause and take a moment to think about how you can turn it into something good.