Pillars of Health 4 : Stress

The fourth Lifestyle Medicine pillar focuses on how stress affects us and what we can do about it.  Before going further, let’s remember that not all stress is bad stress.  There are some stresses that don’t seem to any significant affect on us.  This type of stress is called neustress, or neutral stress.  This doesn’t help us or harm us, it’s just something we notice.  Next we have eustress.  This is good stress, the kind that actually increases our motivation, function, and performance.  This is the kind of stress that builds us up.  An example of this is exercise done properly.  These are the 2 stresses that are not bad for us.  That kind of stress is called distress, and this has a lot of negative effects in our lives.  We’ll talk about that tomorrow.