When stress helps and when it harms

A moderate amount of pressure often helps you perform: you focus and finish the work. Too little and you drift; too much and your thinking narrows, you forget things and you stop sleeping well. That curve is a well-known idea in psychology.

What matters most is how long stress lasts and whether you recover. Short stress followed by rest is normal. Stress that runs for weeks or months with no recovery, called chronic stress, is linked to poor sleep, headaches, stomach problems, low mood and getting ill more often.

So the goal is not a life without stress, which is impossible. It is building in recovery after hard stretches.