Most of us treat stress as something to be eliminated. After all, it’s often the thing that impacts your sleep, stops you thinking clearly, or gets in the way of enjoying life the way you used to.
But stress isn’t a single thing, and it isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s exactly what helps you rise to the challenge. Sometimes it’s a signal that something needs to change. Knowing which one you’re dealing with is important because the response to each is completely different.
So, is stress always bad?
The short answer, no. Short bursts of stress in response to a demanding but manageable situation are normal, and can improve your focus and performance. Stress becomes a problem when the pressure is ongoing, the demands required of you outweigh your ability to manage them, or it doesn’t ease when the demand passes.
The rest of this post covers why understanding the different types of stress matters, and how to tell which type of stress you’re experiencing.
Stress is normal, and often useful
Most jobs come with peaks. A deadline arrives, a project ramps up, someone leaves and their work gets absorbed. During those periods, you might work longer hours, skip a few breaks, or give up some personal time to get through it. Many people accept this as a normal part of their work for short stretches.
The stress response that comes with these types of peaks is your body making resources available. This type of stress can help you focus and give you the energy to meet the demand. That’s what it’s designed to do. It’s the stress response working as intended.
How you think about stress matters
How you interpret stress appears to influence the impact that it has on you.
This idea goes back to Lazarus and Folkman’s work on appraisal in the 1980s, which showed that what matters isn’t just the demands of the situation but our interpretation of it. More recently, researchers have looked at our beliefs about stress in general. Crum and colleagues (2013) found that people who see stress as performance enhancing tend to show more moderate physiological responses and more action-oriented behaviour under pressure than those who see it as purely harmful.
The effects are real but modest. A 2024 meta-analysis found small improvements in performance from this mindset approach to managing stress and stronger, moderate improvements when it was combined with other stress management strategies rather than being used alone (Bosshard & Gomez, 2024). In other words, it’s worth doing, but it isn’t the whole answer.
This is all worth knowing, because it means the racing heart before a presentation doesn’t have to be read as a sign that something is wrong. It can be read as your body getting you ready. That small shift in how you interpret what’s happening in your body often changes how the experience feels.
A word of warning: appraising stress in a positive way has limits, and it doesn’t apply when faced with ongoing or prolonged stress.
Good stress vs bad stress: when the peak stops being a peak
Reframing stress as a positive force works when the demand is challenging but manageable, and you have the resources to meet it. It doesn’t work when the load itself is indefinite and unsustainable.
When temporary pressure becomes permanent, the same behaviours that got you through the peak stop being reasonable. Working longer hours, skipping breaks and sacrificing personal time indefinitely isn’t a strategy. Over time, that kind of sustained pressure can develop into something more like anxiety.
Some signs the pressure has stopped being useful:
- You can’t switch off from work
- Time away doesn’t leave you feeling refreshed
- You feel constantly on edge, keyed up, or carry a sense of dread
- Concentration, focus or decision-making has become harder
- You’re short or irritable with colleagues or family
- You’re having trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking rested
- Muscle tension or headaches have become routine
If several of these have been true for a while, no amount of reframing will fix it. At this point stress is no longer a helpful short term resource, it’s become something persistent that can start negatively impacting you and your work.
Four ways to manage stress at work
- Talk to your manager, clearly and early. If your workload isn’t sustainable, say so and approach your manager with some options. Suggesting what could be reduced, deferred or shared tends to be received as proactive rather than as a complaint. It also helps to seek clarity on what’s genuinely top priority, since “everything” is rarely accurate and often that type of thinking can make the load feel unmanageable.
- Set boundaries, and protect what restores you. Taking a proper lunch break, moving your body, seeing people you like — these aren’t luxuries you earn once the work is done. They’re what keeps you capable of doing the work at all.
- Treat recovery as an investment, not a cost. It’s easy to see a break as lost productive time. But your brain doesn’t sustain high-quality focus indefinitely; attention and decision-making decrease without adequate recovery. Stepping away isn’t time taken from your performance — it’s part of what makes good performance possible.
- Learn to tell the good stress from the bad. When you notice stress building, it’s worth pausing to ask: is this a demanding stretch I have the resources to meet, or is this an ongoing load I can’t sustain? If it’s the first, your stress response is on your side, and treating it that way tends to help. If it’s the second, the useful response isn’t to reframe it — it’s to change something. Recognising which situation you’re in is what tells you whether to work with the stress or to address what’s causing it.
What you bring to it matters too
Two people can face the same workload and experience it completely differently. Alongside the demands themselves, what you bring to them shapes how manageable it feels.
Relentless standards, a harsh internal voice, and the way you handle your own thoughts and emotions can all make stress harder to manage. If nothing is ever quite good enough, the work never really stops. If your response to pressure is to criticise yourself for struggling with it, that’s an added layer of pressure. And if a lot of your energy goes into pushing difficult thoughts and feelings away, there’s less of it available for other things.
The good news is that these are learnable. Recognising when your standards have stopped being useful, developing a more encouraging inner voice, and learning to make room for discomfort rather than fighting it all change how much pressure costs you.
Where to from here
Stress isn’t automatically the enemy. It’s often a normal, useful part of doing work you care about. But it stops being useful when the demands outweigh what you can sustainably meet, and pushing through that indefinitely takes a toll on your performance, your health, and your personal life.
If work has felt relentless for a while and you’re recognising yourself in the signs above, it’s worth getting some support. Recognising the pattern, protecting your recovery, and having somewhere to think it through can help you regain a sense of control.
If you’d like to talk it through, you’re welcome to book a free 15-minute intake call.
Disclaimer – this blog is for education and information purposes only. It does not constitute individual advice. The information contained in this post may not be applicable or appropriate for everyone. If you need support, consider seeking individualised support.
References
- Bosshard, M., & Gomez, P. (2024). Effectiveness of stress arousal reappraisal and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions on task performance outcomes: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Scientific Reports, 14, 7923. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58408-w
- Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716–733. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031201
- Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.
