Without stress, we wouldn’t be here. Stress is an evolutionary force that has shaped us.

These days, we tend to use stress as a bad thing, often saying “I’m so stressed at work” or “This situation is stressing me out”. Which, other than being an appalling abuse of the English language, is a misunderstanding of the role of stress in our lives.

That sort of external, uncontrolled stress is bad for us. It generates negative changes in the body, leading to an increased risk of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, as well as a host of other related health dysfunctions.

Some of this is unavoidable. We cannot always choose our line manager, the person ahead of us in the ticket queue or the unthinking person who has parked across 2 bays when you are already running late.

But we can choose to temper our responses to it and we can train to mitigate the effects.

The body does not differentiate between stressful stimuli. It only knows the basic responses available, so by putting ourselves in stressful situations in controlled conditions and then learning to adapt to them, the body learns an increased resilience to all forms of stress.

Controlled stress can be intense workouts, cold showers, intermittent fasting, learning new or challenging skills. Essentially anything that allows you to develop and grow.

And as you grow in one area, it will cross over to all the others as well.