Minor stressors, like disagreements with coworkers, might have cognitive benefits.
Living under constant, overwhelming stress is bad for health, and some stressors are just unavoidable. But stress isn’t all bad, and a little bit of mild stress can be beneficial.
"Saying a little stress is good for health is at first not exactly what you might expect," said Susan Charles, professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. "There's a lot of research out there saying stress is not good for our health and it's valid. Stress can be very damaging.” Chronic exposure to negative stress can lead to depression, anxiety, headaches, memory impairment and may raise the risk of heart disease.
But at the same time, a life with zero stress isn't the goal. "A little bit of stress is important," said Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "Learning how to cope with challenge is very necessary and it can have positive outcomes, especially if you overcome it." Recent research even shows mild stress could have some benefits for the brain.
Helpful Stress
Stress is a response to pressure. It triggers a reaction in the brain and body that mobilizes resources to face challenging demands. Stressors can be mild, like an argument with a coworker, or major, like, hypothetically, a year of social isolation during a pandemic. It's the mild stressors that researchers think could boost mental function for some people.
Laboratory studies have shown that stressors encountered for a short period can enhance some aspects of cognition. A study of 107 college students found that compared to participants not exposed to a minor stressor – submerging their arms in cold water for three minutes – those that were exposed responded faster in task testing attention: participants had to quickly report what stimulus briefly appeared in the center of a screen while ignoring other distracting stimuli around it. The stressed group was just as accurate, too.
Some of Charles' recent work suggests that everyday stressors might influence cognition too. In a recent survey study of over 2,000 people, on average, people who reported experiencing no minor stressors, such as disagreements with friends or family, over eight days typically performed worse on a cognitive test administered over the phone. (This cognitive test, however, measured different types of cognition, like memory and inductive reasoning, and it's not clear which aspects of cognition the no-stressor people performed worse on). On average, these people were also less likely to be married, less likely to work, had less active daily lives and reported receiving and providing less emotional support.
One interpretation of these results is that those activities and social interactions allow people to exercise their cognitive skills. "People challenge you, people ask you questions, you have to follow the conversations and people get upset if you're not paying attention. It requires more cognition than people sometimes assume," said Charles.
Other studies have found support for this idea. "We kind of need a little stress to affect the brain and cognition," said Allison Bielak, an associate professor at Colorado State University who studies factors influencing age-related cognitive changes. In her work, she's seen associations between staying socially active and stronger cognition. Engaging in a diverse variety of activities and environments, she said, which can include social experiences, demands cognitive skills like attention and decision-making.
"You need to be engaged in a way that can put you out there and keeps your brain active," said Charles. But scientists don’t know how stress, even mild stress, will affect any given person. "We can't tell you what the individual will do," Charles added. "There are so many factors that are related to healthy minds."
The Stress Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Perception of stress, in addition to the severity of stress, matters too. Public speaking could ignite a strong fight-or-flight response in one person while giving another person minor butterflies.
"What matters with stress is your perception more than the reality," said Yehuda. Her research focuses on traumatic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. "The difference between people who develop PTSD after a particular event [and those who don’t] has a lot to do with their perception of what happened and their ability to cope with it."
Even when people feel significant stress, there is evidence that their beliefs about stress influence physical and mental health outcomes. More negatives perceptions of stressful events are associated with poorer physical and mental health.
"You don't want to come to the conclusion that having stress is good…it's too binary. We don't want to think about stress as being binary," said Yehuda. "What we want to think about is, what's the right way of engaging with the world?"
