Relax! Stress, if Managed, Can Be Good For You

When work gets overwhelming, Daniel Lobring picks up his drumsticks.

Unless you're a natural-born optimist, of course, you may really have to work at seeing possibilities when times are tough. "The way to become more resilient is to live in the world, challenging yourself socially, psychologically, and intellectually," contends stress and resilience researcher Mary Steinhardt, a therapist and professor of health education at the University of Texas-Austin. In a study published in the January Journal of American College Health, she found that stressed-out college students who were given four weekly therapy sessions—focusing on coping strategies, self-esteem building, and making interpersonal connections—increased their "stress resilience," a measure of how quickly they bounce back after feeling stressed, far more than peers who didn't get the counseling.

Steinhardt suggests pausing when stress hits to simply recognize its source, whether it's an unrealistic deadline, a family reunion, or an inflating mortgage. Focusing your attention on the problem is key to identifying what you can control and accepting what you can't and to preventing a panicked reaction from developing unchecked. If you're not in a panic, you can offer yourself some coaching: Is anger going to be productive? Are you really (choose one): a bad employee, the black sheep of the family, someone completely incapable of handling personal finances?

Being a perfectionist, not surprisingly, can lead to excessively high cortisol levels, increasing the risk of diabetes and depression. Working mother Alice Domar, a Harvard Medical School professor and author of Be Happy Without Being Perfect, argues that we need to retrain our brains to think realistically. She recommends keeping a journal detailing any perfectionist tendencies, what's gained from them (a spotless house, perhaps), and what's lost (the novel waiting on your nightstand).

The guilt has to go along with the outsize expectations. Feeling overwhelmed by the needs of her husband and two kids and the demands of her employee relations job at computer maker Dell, Tonja Eaton of Round Rock, Texas, says she learned to put her wants (free time on Sundays, family evenings at home, belly-dancing classes) over her shoulds (visits with relatives, birthday parties for her children's acquaintances, serving on a charity board) after joining a monthly "personal renewal group" focusing on work-life balance issues. More than 150 of these groups, based on The Mother's Guide to Self-Renewal by Renée Trudeau, have formed around the country. "I've discovered a lot of creative ways to say no," says Eaton, 36. "I've learned to make it a rule that a minimum of 50 percent of weekends be spent at home. We're much more connected as a family when we do that."

Understressed. While the health hazards of too much stress have been well established, too little isn't good for you either, according to Monika Fleshner, an associate professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado-Boulder who has conducted numerous studies on the stress response. It could be that if the stress system isn't activated often enough, she theorizes, it produces higher levels of stress hormones when it does get turned on. Like a muscle, it may need to be used regularly in order to stay in peak working condition. This could explain why some people fall apart when hit by a serious crisis while others rise to the occasion. If your body isn't used to having challenges, Fleshner speculates, "perhaps when the stress response finally does get turned on, it's hard to turn off."