Stress Is A Good Thing
In another blog post I discuss how being overwhelmed by stress causes all of our behavioral issues. You may be thinking stress is a bad thing. But it’s not, it’s actually a good thing. Stress is how we learn and grow. Only being overwhelmed by stress is a bad thing. Taking our bodies beyond their present ability to cope is when things get bad. What we want to do is slowly build up our tolerance to this stress, that is how we grow.
Let’s see how our exposure to the sun is a great example of this phenomenon. I used it before to explain why a sunburn is our body’s signal that we have been overwhelmed by a stressful event. We know that as our skin is exposed to the sun the melanin darkens to prevent a burn. That is a positive response to stress. We encounter a stress, and we adapt. The more often we encounter this stress, the more our body adapts. Go to the beach and you can quickly see who has been there for longer days. The people who have been in the sun for more days have darker skin, their bodies have continuously ramped up their response to the stress by increasing the darkness of the melanin to protect from the sun. The people with the dark tans successfully increased their body’s stress response and now can handle more of the stressful event, time in the sun, because they gave their bodies time to adapt. Each day the body was able to handle more and more sun, stress. As we are exposed to stress, without being overwhelmed by it, we grow and adapt to it so we can handle more. It’s a pretty simple concept really.
Think about how this plays out with your child in school. They start reading 1st grade books. Then when they can easily handle those books they move to 2nd grade books, and on and on. The increase in stress is measured and they are given time to adapt. It would make no sense to go from a 1st grade book to a 5th grade level book, the child would be completely overwhelmed and would not be able to grow their stress response to learning. So, let’s take this measured response with other areas of life that are stressful for our kids. And just as we would not blame a 1st grader for not being able to read a 5th grade level book, let’s not blame our kids for not being able to handle other stressful events they are not ready to handle either. Because what good would that do?
