Is some stress actually good for you?

The idea that some stress is good has been around since Hans Selye's mid-twentieth-century framing of eustress as distinct from distress. The evidence is more mixed than the popular framing suggests. Acute, time-limited stress around something personally meaningful can support performance, and the mindset that views stress as enhancing rather than threatening produces measurable, if modest, benefits in studied populations. None of this applies to chronic stress, and the popular reframe is sometimes used in ways that minimise legitimate distress.

Written and reviewed by Natalia Cajide, Registered Psychologist (AHPRA PSY0002474316). 4 min read. Published 7 June 2026. Last reviewed 7 June 2026. Next review 7 June 2027.

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The kernel of truth, and where it tends to be stretched

The "stress is bad for you" framing has a long cultural history and a lot of weight. The "some stress is actually good for you" reframe has been popular in self-help and workplace wellness for at least a decade, and it has a kernel of truth that is worth taking seriously.

The kernel is this. Acute, time-limited stress is part of how human bodies and minds were designed to function. A meaningful demand mobilises the system. Attention sharpens. Energy becomes available. Performance, in many domains, improves up to a point and then falls off as arousal becomes too high. This is sometimes described as the Yerkes-Dodson model, which is best treated as a useful heuristic rather than as a law, given its 1908 animal-research origins. The underlying observation is robust, however. Performance is not best at the lowest possible arousal level. It is best at a moderate arousal level fitted to the demand at hand.

The body-based version of this is one I work with often in sessions. People who have been told all their life that stress is bad sometimes carry an additional layer of distress about being stressed at all. The frame can become "I am stressed, which means something is wrong with me," and the additional distress about being stressed can be more costly than the original stress itself.

What the mindset research shows, and what it does not

A line of research initiated by Alia Crum and colleagues in 2013, and built on through to a 2023 metacognitive extension, has shown that mindsets about stress can be changed, and that a stress-is-enhancing mindset is associated with different physiological and behavioural patterns than a stress-is-debilitating one (Crum, Salovey, & Achor, 2013; Crum et al., 2023). A 2024 meta-analysis of thirty-five randomised controlled trials, involving over five thousand participants, found that interventions designed to shift this mindset produced a small but statistically significant improvement in performance outcomes (Bosshard & Gomez, 2024). The authors identified publication bias in the underlying literature and noted that the effect shrinks substantially after correction. They were explicit that these interventions are "not silver bullets."

What this evidence supports is a modest claim. Some kinds of acute, demand-bound stress, in the right contexts, can be reframed productively, and the reframing produces small benefits. What it does not support is the broader claim sometimes made in popular writing, that chronic stress is also a positive force, or that the appropriate response to ongoing stress is simply to think about it differently. Chronic stress, the kind that does not have a clear off-ramp, is the kind that the allostatic load research has shown to produce real and measurable harm over time. The reframe applies to a specific category of acute stress, not to the experience of being stuck under sustained demand.

What I notice in the room

I do not, in a first session, ask people to reframe their stress as enhancing as an opening move. The reason is that the reframe often lands as invalidating when the stress in question is chronic, or when the situation producing it is one the person cannot change. The mindset work is most useful when the stress is acute, demand-bound, and the person has reasonable resources to meet the demand. In that situation, recognising that the body is mobilising rather than malfunctioning, and meeting the activation as helpful rather than threatening, can shift the experience in real time.

For the chronic situation, the mindset reframe is not the place to start. The work there is the work described in the guides on rest, recovery, and context.

The "stress is sometimes good" line is true, in a specific way, for a specific kind of stress. Acute. Time-limited. Demand-bound. The system you have is built to meet a demand and then to return to baseline, and the meeting of the demand is not the problem. The problem, when there is one, is usually that the system has not had room to return to baseline, or that the demand is no longer something the person can match with their current resources. Distinguishing which of those two is happening is the actual useful question, more useful than the abstract question of whether stress is good or bad in some general sense. The system can do its job. What it cannot do is run hot indefinitely without recovery, and no amount of mindset work will change that.

This content is general information only. It is not a substitute for individual psychological or medical advice. Reading this does not establish a therapeutic relationship with Equal Psychology or any of their clinicians.