Some stress is good for you

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A note for Lesson no. 5, "Your Brain Secretly Works With Other Brains," in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context from page 90‌ is:

Brief withdrawals from your body budget followed by deposits create a stronger, better you.

To some extent, stress is a state of mind, defined not by events in the world but what they mean to you (i.e., does your brain interpret something as threatening and prepare your body to act accordingly).[1][2] What is stressful to one person may not be experienced as stressful by another, and not all events that are momentarily stressful are necessarily bad for you (e.g., [3][4][5]).


References

  1. McEwen, Bruce S. 2012. "Brain on Stress: How the Social Environment Gets Under the Skin." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (Supplement 2): 17180–17185.
  2. Smith, Eric N., Erik Santoro, Neema Moraveji, Michael Susi, and Alia J. Crum. 2019. "Integrating Wearables in Stress Management Interventions: Promising Evidence From a Randomized Trial." International Journal of Stress Management 27 (2), 172–182.
  3. Smith, Eric N., Michael D. Young, and Alia J. Crum. 2020 "Stress, Mindsets, and Success in Navy SEALs Special Warfare Training." Frontiers in Psychology 10: 2962.
  4. Park, Daeun, Alisa Yu, Sarah E. Metz, Eli Tsukayama, Alia J. Crum, and Angela L. Duckworth. 2018. "Beliefs About Stress Attenuate the Relation Among Adverse Life Events, Perceived Distress, and Self-Control." Child Development 89 (6): 2059–2069.
  5. Crum, Alia J., Modupe Akinola, Ashley Martin, and Sean Fath. 2017. "The Role of Stress Mindset in Shaping Cognitive, Emotional, and Physiological Responses To Challenging and Threatening Stress." Anxiety, Stress, & Coping 30 (4): 379–395.