If you had a chance to read my post last week you saw that I said something confusing and controversial: Stress is not the problem. 

Lots of you reacted – in really positive ways – to that with your own experiences of growing and learning from stress, being motivated by stress to do something positive. But the underlying premise – that stress is, as one of you put it, “a silent killer” does seem to stick. 

Stress is no more silent, and no more of a killer, than exercise. 

The analogy of stress to exercise is a good starting point. Stress is to resilience as exercise is to body health. If we want to get more physically fit we have to (unfortunately) exercise. And if we want to get more resilient we have to experience stress. Both stress and exercise feel… terrible for most of us. Both stress and exercise do damage if we get too much of it, or if we’re not hydrated, rested, healthy to begin with. Both actually help our bodies and brains get stronger.

The analogy of stress to exercise doesn’t carry us through to the end of the story, I know. More on that next week. 

For now, I want to keep questioning the idea that stress is a silent killer. It is not insidious like an invisible poison in the air we breathe, though we’re often told it is. Like anything, the danger is in the dose – we need to pay attention to our health at the beginning and the amount we try to handle. 

Do you notice that you have a fundamental belief that stress must be dangerous? Or are you part of conversations that see it another way?

All my best,

Dr. G

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