The Different Types Of Stress
And How To Define Stress

There are several classifications, but these are the two main types of stress:

1. Eustress – The good stress (the prefix eu- means good in greek). This is the kind you may experience before a competition, presentation, promotion, a date, or another usually planned event. Eustress helps bring out the best in you so you can meet and overcome these challenges.
2. Distress – the bad stress, the kind you tend to become reactive from rather than control because it is misfortunate and usually unplanned. Eustress may become distress if there are too many stressors in a person's life.

The difference between the types of stress lies with the emotions associated with the stress.

Eustress is associated with positive emotions.

Distress is associated with negative emotions.

A positive or negative perception depends on the person dealing with the stress.

But how do you define stress? What is it?

Stress is simply any given response to a stimulus/demand and involves coping with continuous change. The types of stress you must cope with depend on how you perceive the change you're responding to and dealing with.

A couple of examples...

One person may love giving presentations while another contemplates jumping off a bridge before his presentation. You may want to go on a date with someone or perhaps you were asked and didn't have the heart to say no.

Essentially, a person's perception and reaction to any given stimulus/event determines whether or not that stimulus becomes eustress or distress.

It is also helpful to understand that any mantra (thought, word, phrase etc.) you allow to exist in your mind produces a set of feelings depending on the mantras' connotations and meanings. Those feelings tend to produce additional mantras in the same positive or negative manner because reasons and feelings interact in your brain.

If you change your mantras/perceptions, you change your mind.

Acute And Chronic Stress

1. Acute stress is typically short-term and occurs when there's major changes –- hyperstress –- in a person's life.
2. Chronic stress is enduring and usually sufficient for a person to gradually break down due to lack of rest and emotional recovery. There's typically periods of both hyperstress and hypostress –- the latter referring to insufficient amounts of stress. Here we're dealing with too much routine and not enough challenges, causing feelings of boredom, helplessness, and meaninglessness.

Chronic stress over months and years may push a person across his/her coping threshold, resulting in depression, burn-out, or possibly worse.

Or this coping threshold may never be crossed yet the person lives a miserable life near his or her coping threshold. This is possibly the worst case scenario because a whole life may be lived unfulfilled.

Unfortunately, severe distress tends to cloud a person's judgment and cognitive abilities to the point where he is unaware of his own suffering.

For example, more than half of people diagnosed with depression are unaware of their condition.

On an interesting side note, negative feelings produce distress and vice versa. A person genetically predisposed to negative feelings may wonder why he/she is feeling so stressed when there aren't any obvious external events to justify it.

This is why...

The (fear or anger-based) fight-or-flight response is the cause of stress, and stress further increases the fight or flight response. A genetic predisposition to negative emotions may perpetuate this stressful feedback cycle.

In conclusion, the way you handle stress determines which types of stress dominate your everyday life. There's more on how to deal with distress in the section on compassion - the antidote to distress.

And there's quick stress relief in these relaxation exercises.

Return from Different Types of Stress to Symptoms of Stress.

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