When can you know the difference between experiencing beneficial stress and harmful stress?

Healthy stress is stress that motivates you. If you are faced with a problem or circumstance, instead of shutting down or using other unhealthy coping strategies, you rise to the challenge. If it is harmful, you deal with it in a bad manner, and this is method is different for everyone. Some people use alcohol, food, social isolation, excersise and other things to deal with those anxious feelings. So if you're faced with a stressful situation and you find your self trying to "numb" it, it might be unhealthy stress. The amount of stress a person can take varies from person to person… so comparing workloads of other people will only do more harm.

Beneficial stress makes you powerful and helps you being good at what you do. Harmful stress have negative impacts on your life (such as your sleep or the way you eat), and makes you feel vulnerable and less able to cope with some situations.

If the stress is chronic or long term and is affecting our ability to manage daily functions, make decisions and feel happiness, that may not be the beneficial stress. If the stress is helping us to prioritize and focus on getting our work done perhaps that would be beneficial.

When the stress takes over, it ruins your healthy habits, you lose too much or gain too much weight, you feel irritated by the smallest things all the time, you cry a lot more than you usually do, you feel mentally and emotionally exhausted and you're tired no matter how much sleep you get = harmful stress! Listen to yourself, listen to your body, don't take on too much work or do too much for other people if you haven't put yourself first at times.

Beneficial stress springs you into action. Harmful stress makes you feel stuck or frozen. If it doesn't help you accomplish something, it's probably harmful.

The difference between beneficial stress & harmful stress is all about how you find yourself responding to it. Beneficial stress will improve your performance or productivity, whereas harmful stress will overwhelm you & cause you to shut down.

Stress is a normal part of life--it's what makes us human. We all have roles in society, whether it is getting an education, going to work every day, etc. I usually find that after completing a task that really stressed me out, like a huge assignment, I feel very relieved and happy, and that could count as beneficial stress. Beneficial stress drives you to get things done. Harmful stress is when you start to feel emotionally/mentally impacted--sleeping to escape, feeling depressed, overwhelmed, anxious, etc.

Beneficial stress is stress that you have when you know u are learning something from what you are doing even though it is stressful. Harmful stress is stress that affects you mentally, physically & emotionally.

The difference between beneficial and harmful stress is that harmful stress doesn't come from something that can better you as an individual. Harmful stress is something that you don't see an end to

Stress is a way your body gets more energy, and mentally alert. When we were apes, and faced danger like for example lack of food, or an encounter with a wild animal we would get momentarily energized and overcome these obstacles at all costs. By searching for fruits or running away (respectively). However, in modern society this kind of stress is mostly prejudicial as we do face "danger" in everyday life but we are never in actual real danger. Imagine a college student who is overwhelmed by his work and is worried about his final exams. This stress is in fact counter productive, as it can have terrible long term consequences and even ruin this person's concentration, making it even harder to get a good scored on the tests. To put this simply, beneficial stress is something that literally saves your life, in life threatening situations, whereas prejudicial stress is something pointless, that makes you feel bad in the long term and may even cause depression.