It's Good to Be a Little Stressed

Why experiencing some adversity is better for your mental health than experiencing no adversity

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

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Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash

I recently moved, and it was among the most stressful things I’ve done in my life. We have a toddler, so moving involved finding someone to be “on” him constantly while we packed and unpacked, as well as finding him a new daycare, and trying to set up his room as quickly as possible so we didn’t disrupt his routine too much.

Then there were the typical address changes, logistical challenges, and the uncertainty over whether we would sell our old house. We also don’t know anyone in our new town and don’t have a “village” here, so it’s not like we could throw back beers with old friends while we slowly unpacked together. The first few weeks were a lot of tense days in which one of us opened boxes while the other watched our kid. (Not pictured: The surprise norovirus that swept through the house the first weekend.) We have to find all new doctors, dentists, and other service providers. I basically feel like I launched myself into outer space, and while it is cool and I like it here, it is also scary.

BUT, I also feel like I can handle it. It’s been a little more than a month now, and I more or less feel settled. Occasionally something will come up with our new house or our new town that is challenging or unexpected, but I can usually figure out how we’re going to deal with it pretty quickly. (Our dryer broke right as we were moving in, for instance, but our landlord was good about it.) I have socialized a few times, and my kid seems to like his daycare well enough. We FaceTimed his old nanny recently, and it was sweet but he didn’t have a meltdown or anything. We’ve found some local spots that are fairly welcoming to toddlers, and I’m working on making mom friends.

All in all, if I do say so myself, I’ve handled this objectively stressful thing rather well. I’m falling to pieces a lot less than might be expected for someone who was in the 94th percentile of neuroticism just a few years ago.

And I think this is because, just 20 months before we moved, we did the actual most stressful thing we’ve ever done: We had a baby.

I had the kind of birth and newborn experience that, in earlier eras, was said to “build character.” (Today we’d probably just say it was traumatizing.) I had planned a natural birth, but ended up having an emergency C-section because of a problem with my placenta that endangered my baby. Then he went to the NICU because of a problem with his breathing. Then we came home. Breastfeeding didn’t work. The pump made my nipples bleed. He never stopped crying, especially when we held him. It’s like he hated it when we touched him. I have no idea what it means to do a “contact nap” because if I was holding him, it meant he was screaming. Then he turned four months old and he was diagnosed with a rare and somewhat disabling genetic condition. Then I had to go back to work.

I remember being so stressed out during this time that I would cry to the point of dry heaving. I would drive around shoveling Chick-fil-a in my mouth while dissociating and sort of hoping I would get hit by a car. At one point I asked my husband, “did we just ruin our lives?”

But though I wish, for my own sake, that I’d had a better newborn experience, I do think, in retrospect, that enduring that stressful period benefitted me. Research is beginning to show that, though serious, unrelenting adversity is of course not advisable, short and manageable periods of stress can actually make you stronger. For me, having had the most stressful possible baby-having experience made moving across the country feel like a breeze. And it’s making me see other stressors as more manageable, too.

This theory, which is called “toughening,” comes from Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, and I wrote a bit about it in this Washington Post article. Seery and others have found that both humans and animals who’ve been exposed to small, manageable stressors are able to face future stressors with more confidence and less anxiety.

In an interview, Seery likened it to physical fitness. If you never work out, you’ll never be sore, but you also won’t grow stronger. Similarly, if you’re never stressed, your mind and body never learn to deal with stress when it inevitably arises. “Things like having to give a speech in public, even though it may be terrifying to begin with, that could develop toughness,” Seery told me. His own research has shown that people who have experienced some negative life events—including serious setbacks like injuries and divorce—seem to have better mental health than people who have experienced either lots of adversity or no adversity at all. In lab experiments, people who have experienced some, but not a lot, of adversity react less negatively to sticking their hands in ice-cold water or taking an important test than people who were untouched by adversity. (Seery said this number is very approximate, but about five negative life events seems to be the sweet spot.) Over time, Seery told me, difficult periods in life “can actually lead people to have this greater capacity to have a more positive response in the face of something stressful.”

I like this theory for two reasons. First, shitty things are going to happen to you, and it’s nice to think they will prepare you for all the other shitty things that are unfortunately also in your future. Now, whenever something annoying or bad happens, I sometimes think to myself, “oh, but at least this is giving me some reps for when the shit REALLY hits the fan.” This is my version of optimism!

But also, it reminds me of my favorite way of thinking about reducing neuroticism, the trait associated with anxiety. Readers of the book will know that bringing down my sky-high neuroticism level was a big part of my personality project, but simply trying to Be Less Stressed didn’t work for me. I care a lot about my work and my family, so anything going wrong in either of those two domains will be stressful for me. I can’t just sit on a mountaintop and meditate it away. Instead, what finally clicked for me was something the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary told me in one of our interviews:

“Mental health is not the absence of uncomfortable feelings. It’s our ability to struggle.”

To me, a healthy level of anxiety is not the absence of stress, it’s the ability to deal with stress. It’s feeling the anxiety. It’s realizing that this is super unfortunate and you’d really rather it not be happening. It’s, yeah, maybe crying and dry-heaving a little. AND THEN it’s pulling yourself together and doing what you need to do anyway. It’s realizing that, ultimately, you can handle it, even if, like a really tough workout, it sucks while it’s happening. Healthy anxiety is the ability to look at something daunting on the horizon and say, “ugh. Okay, let’s do this.”