Is Stress Good for You? Responses from a LinkedIn Poll

Is Stress Good for You? What 834 Votes and the Research Actually Say

Jason Schroeder put a question out on LinkedIn: is stress good for you? The poll generated 834 votes, 72 comments, and 35,000 views. The responses ranged widely, from firm declarations that all stress is harmful to equally firm declarations that stress is essential for growth, with a thoughtful middle ground in between. What emerged from reading through all of them was not a simple yes or no but something more useful: a clearer picture of what stress actually is, how the body responds to different types of it, and what that means for leaders in construction who are managing both their own stress and the environments they create for the people around them.

Where the Confusion Comes From

The confusion about stress starts with how the word entered public consciousness. When the original researchers studying the stress response began publishing findings that linked certain types of stress to negative health outcomes, the message that traveled through culture was simpler than the science: stress is bad. The nuance, which was present in the original research and has been significantly developed in the decades since, is that the researchers were studying specific types of stress, including trauma, abuse, and chronic physical threat, not the full spectrum of stress that human beings experience in daily life.

Most people in construction are not experiencing the kinds of distress those researchers were studying when they answer emails, manage a difficult owner conversation, or push to hit a project milestone. Many of them are, however, experiencing eustress, the type of physiological activation that helps people rise to challenges, think clearly under pressure, and perform at their best. Understanding the difference between those two categories is more useful than a blanket verdict on stress as a concept.

What Eustress and Distress Actually Are

The terms come from Hans Selye, who coined both words to describe the two ends of the stress spectrum. Eustress is the positive, performance-enhancing form. It is what happens when the body activates in response to a challenge that is within range of the person’s capabilities. Cortisol levels rise, but so does oxytocin, the hormone associated with human connection, trust, and social bonding. The body primes itself to engage, connect, and perform. Eustress is what athletic competition, meaningful professional challenge, and high-stakes creative work tend to produce. It increases life expectancy and is associated with stronger social bonds, better learning retention, and improved performance.

Distress is what happens when cortisol rises without the corresponding increase in oxytocin. The body shifts into a survival mode rather than a performance mode. The social connection response does not activate. Chronic distress, meaning the kind that is sustained over long periods without recovery, is associated with the negative health outcomes that the original stress research was documenting: cardiovascular problems, immune suppression, mental health deterioration. The distinction matters enormously for how leaders think about the environments they create and the stress they ask their teams to carry.

The Yerkes-Dodson Curve in Practice

Several respondents to the LinkedIn poll referenced the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which describes the relationship between arousal and performance as an inverted U. Performance improves as arousal and activation increase, up to a point. Beyond that point, additional stress does not produce more performance. It produces less. The right amount of challenge, pressure, and activation drives people to their best work. Too little and the work is uninspired. Too much and performance degrades, decisions become reactive rather than strategic, and the team enters crisis mode.

For construction leaders, the practical application of this curve is understanding where their project team is on the arousal axis. A team that is understimulated, operating without meaningful challenge or accountability, is not performing at its potential. A team that is chronically overburdened, missing sleep, skipping recovery, and managing too many simultaneous demands without adequate support is past the peak of the curve and losing performance even as the apparent activity level stays high. Creating conditions for optimal performance means finding and protecting the zone where challenge is real and recovery is possible.

What the Body Does With Stress

The body has several primary responses to stress, and understanding them adds nuance to the conversation. Fight-or-flight is the most commonly known: the body prepares for immediate physical threat by prioritizing speed and strength over long-term thinking. The challenge response is less discussed but equally important: when the body reads a situation as a challenge rather than a threat, it still activates the stress response, but in a way that supports focus, performance, and learning rather than pure survival. The tend-and-befriend response, which research suggests is particularly active in social beings, redirects stress activation toward nurturing others and strengthening social bonds during difficult moments. This is the response that drives people toward each other in a crisis rather than away from each other.

Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress, which Jason recommends directly in this episode, makes a compelling case that the tend-and-befriend response is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the human stress system. When people experience stress in the context of meaningful relationships and shared purpose, the stress itself can strengthen those connections. That has direct implications for construction teams: a project under genuine pressure, managed by a leader who keeps the team connected, communicates transparently, and treats difficulty as a shared challenge, can emerge from that pressure closer and more capable than before.

What the Respondents Got Right

Reading through the responses to the LinkedIn poll reveals a community that is more thoughtful about this topic than the simple yes-or-no framing might suggest. Several themes appear across the responses:

• The distinction between eustress and distress is the most useful frame: stress that is within a person’s capability and comes with social support is fundamentally different from stress that exceeds capability or is experienced in isolation and fear
• Preparation changes the nature of stress: the same objectively difficult situation is experienced differently by a prepared person who has built skills and support than by an unprepared one who has not
• Much of what people call stress is actually self-imposed pressure connected to ego, goals, and deadlines that can be reframed and managed with the right mindset and access to resources
• Complete elimination of stress is not the goal and is not achievable: as Selye himself said, complete freedom from stress is death
• Chronic stress, especially in the absence of recovery and social connection, produces genuine harm that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed

One Respondent Said It Best

Jesse’s comment in the poll stood out for its honesty and precision. He described how much of the stress he experiences is fabricated, tied to self-imposed deadlines, budgets, and goals that are ultimately connected to ego. He noted that it had been a very long time since he faced a problem that exceeded the resources at his disposal, and that the truly difficult stressors, chronic mental illness, disease, hunger, are in a different category entirely.

That observation contains a useful correction for anyone who has conflated the pressure of professional ambition with the kind of distress that warrants clinical attention. Both deserve to be understood clearly. The person experiencing genuine trauma, chronic mental illness, or the kind of sustained distress that is causing real harm needs support, not advice to reframe. The person who is stressed about whether the weekly work plan will hold, whether the owner will approve the change order, or whether the project will hit its milestone is experiencing a category of stress that is generally within their capability to manage and often within their power to transform into fuel for performance.

What This Means for Construction Leaders

The built environment of a construction project is shaped in part by the stress conditions the leader creates or tolerates. A team that is consistently overburdened without recovery, whose roadblocks are never cleared, who operates in an environment of fear and blame, is experiencing chronic distress of the kind that produces human disconnection, declining performance, and the mental health outcomes that the industry’s suicide statistics reflect. A team that is appropriately challenged, supported, and operating in an environment of psychological safety is experiencing eustress of the kind that drives performance, connection, and growth.

The leader’s role in that distinction is not passive. Creating the conditions for eustress rather than distress requires deliberate choices: leveling the work so the team has capacity, removing roadblocks before they create crisis, building psychological safety so that problems can be surfaced without fear, and communicating with transparency so that the challenge is shared rather than siloed in a few people. Those are not soft choices. They are production decisions with measurable consequences for the schedule, the quality, and the wellbeing of every person on the project.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

Reframe First, Eliminate What You Can

The closing challenge from this episode is twofold. First, for the stress that is within your capability to handle, practice reframing it. The same physical state of activation that produces anxiety can produce peak performance when it is interpreted as readiness rather than threat. That reframe is not denial. It is a legitimate, research-supported cognitive shift that changes both the experience of the stress and the outcomes it produces. Second, for the stress that is genuinely harmful, whether it is the chronic overburden of a team operating without capacity or the deeper distress of someone experiencing real mental health challenges, take it seriously and get support. The goal is not to eliminate all stress. The goal is to design environments where the stress that exists is the kind that makes people stronger.

On we go.

FAQ

What is the difference between eustress and distress?

Eustress is the positive, activating form of stress that occurs when the body responds to a challenge that is within a person’s capability to handle. It is typically short-term, accompanied by a rise in both cortisol and oxytocin, and associated with improved performance, stronger social bonds, and better learning outcomes. Distress is what occurs when stress exceeds a person’s resources, is sustained over time without recovery, or is experienced in an environment of fear and isolation. Cortisol rises without the corresponding oxytocin increase, which leads to social disconnection and is associated with the negative health outcomes that most people associate with the word stress. The distinction matters because the appropriate response to each type is different.

What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law and how does it apply to construction teams?

The Yerkes-Dodson Law describes the relationship between arousal and performance as an inverted U shape. Performance improves as activation and challenge increase, reaches a peak at an optimal level of arousal, and then declines as arousal continues to increase beyond that point. For construction teams, this means that a team with no meaningful challenge is not performing at its potential, and a team that is chronically overburdened is also not performing at its potential, even if the activity level appears high. The leader’s job is to manage the team’s position on that curve, creating real challenge and accountability while ensuring the capacity and recovery that prevent the team from tipping into the declining performance zone.

How does preparation affect the experience of stress?

A person who has built relevant skills, developed relevant knowledge, and established a reliable support system experiences the same objectively difficult situation differently than someone who has not. Preparation shifts the body’s interpretation of a stressful situation from a threat that exceeds capability to a challenge that is within capability, which activates a different physiological response and produces better outcomes. This is one reason why training is not separate from performance management in construction: the superintendent who has been trained in scheduling, lean systems, and production management approaches a difficult project with a fundamentally different stress response than one who has not.

What does the tend-and-befriend stress response mean for a construction team under pressure?

The tend-and-befriend response is the body’s mechanism for responding to stress by strengthening social bonds and moving toward others rather than away from them. It is activated when stress is experienced in the context of meaningful relationships and shared purpose. For a construction team under genuine project pressure, this response is what drives people to cover for each other, solve problems collaboratively, and emerge from a difficult period closer and more capable than before. Leaders can activate this response by ensuring that the team’s stress is experienced as shared rather than siloed, that communication is transparent, and that the challenge is framed as one the team is facing together.

When does stress become something that requires outside support?

When stress is chronic, exceeds a person’s available resources over a sustained period, or is associated with trauma, mental illness, or situations involving genuine threat to safety or wellbeing, it moves beyond what reframing and self-management can address alone. Jesse’s comment in the poll drew the right distinction: the stress of professional goals and self-imposed deadlines is in a different category from the stress of chronic mental illness, disease, or genuine trauma. The construction industry has a suicide rate nearly four times the national average, which is a signal that many workers and leaders are carrying distress that exceeds their available resources. Taking that seriously, connecting people to support, and creating environments of psychological safety where problems can be surfaced without shame are not soft choices. They are urgent responsibilities for anyone leading a construction team.