Stress. We often think about stress in a negative light. But in reality there is good stress and bad stress. Let’s expand this.
Good or positive stressors are things that are constructive for our bodies. They help build us up.
Bad or negative stressors are, well the opposite. They are things that tear our bodies down.

There are 3 categories of stressors I want us to think about.

• Physical
• Biochemical
• Emotional

Each one of these can be either constructive or destructive.

Common examples of good physical stress are gravity and exercise. Negative physical stress could be caused by traumas like car accidents, sporting injuries, fall down stairs, childhood slips and falls. Or even slow building ones like keeping poor posture by sitting or slouching.
Biochemical stress is the type of stress that is caused by things we eat or ingest. Examples of good stress would be nutrient rich foods like whole foods. Fast food, simple sugar foods or even synthetic substances like artificial additives or drugs are types of negative stress that can cause inflammation and damage.

We are often very familiar with the causes of negative emotional stress. But did you know that you can experience positive emotional stress? Have you ever noticed how you feel after you achieve something, or finish at task, kick a goal or tick off something on your bucket list? These things release feel good hormones that are essential for our bodies to function properly.

So let’s put this in a practical example.

Picture a bucket with a leak in the bottom. Picture a constant supply of water going in and water constantly leaking out of the bottom.
Now in this analogy, we are the bucket and the water level is symbolic of our overall health expression. The more water we have in the bucket, the better our health is. We feel great in our body, mind and spirit. The less water we have, the worse our health expression is. This is when we feel like everything is a chore, or that our body isn’t functioning well or getting worse.

The water going in symbolises your positive stressors. The water going out is your negative stressors.
The more overwhelmingly negative stress we have, the more our health expression declines.

Life is a balancing act. Unfortunately, we don’t live life in a bubble so we will never be able to fix the leaky bucket. But what we can do is make sure we overwhelm the negative stressors with the positive ones. Always making sure the scale is tipped in favour of the constructive things we do for our body is essential for making sure we can maintain our level of health for as long as we can.

Till next time!