Stress: From Eustress to Distress

1. Stress as a normal response. The stress response is adaptive in the short term. Eustress is the term for stress that is challenging and manageable, such as training, learning or a stretching project. Distress is stress that overwhelms the person's capacity to cope or recover. The same event can be either, depending on control, support, duration and recovery.
2. Allostasis and allostatic load. Allostasis is stability through change: the body's stress systems adapt to demands. Allostatic load is the cumulative wear and tear when those systems are activated too often, too long, or fail to switch off (McEwen, 1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators depend on how long and how often they are activated.
3. Perception and control matter. In the caregiver study (Lesson 4.1), those who perceived themselves as more stressed and unable to control events showed more telomere shortening (Epel et al., 2004). Control, predictability and support shape the biological cost of the same load.
4. Psychological ageing. In an Ohio cohort of 660 adults over 50, people with more positive self-perceptions of ageing lived about 7.5 years longer on average, after controlling for age, sex, socioeconomic status, loneliness and functional health (Levy et al., 2002). It is one observational cohort and does not prove that changing attitudes changes survival, but it supports taking attitudes to ageing seriously and asking about them.
5. Signs of tipping into distress. Persistent poor sleep, irritability, low mood or anxiety, loss of enjoyment, frequent illness, slow recovery from exercise or illness, muscle tension and headaches, digestive change, and reliance on caffeine, alcohol or sugar to cope. These are signals to explore, not diagnoses.
6. Resilience skills. Recovery habits (sleep, movement, time outside), boundaries, social connection, breathing and relaxation practices, graded exposure to challenge, and professional support where needed. Teach as menus, not prescriptions.
7. When to refer. Persistent low mood, panic, thoughts of self-harm, substance misuse, or symptoms interfering with work or relationships. Coaches must have a clear route to a clinician or crisis support.

A client says they thrive on stress but are waking at 4 am and have stopped training because of fatigue. How do you explore this?

When did stress last make you better at something, and when did it stop doing so?

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