Your car gets towed, you narrowly miss the bus, and your backpack busts opens, spilling the contents onto the slushy sidewalk. You grumble and cry, your eyebrows scrunch up, and your heart races with frustration. Think life sucks? Well, buck up.

It turns out that daily stressors — ever so common this time of year — may actually be good for you, strengthening your immune system and fortifying you against larger stressful obstacles.

That hard-to-believe information comes from recent research at Ohio State University, where scientists placed subjects under two kinds of stress. One was a timed memory test, and the other was watching a bloody surgical video. The researchers watched study participants squirm, took biological samples of the stressed-out subjects’ saliva (an indicator of physiological responses), and came up with counterintuitive findings. "A hassle a day keeps the doctor away," concluded lead study author Jos Bosch.

"Stress, in and of itself, isn’t bad," agrees local psychologist Kalman M. Heller, of the Needham Psychotherapy Associates. "That’s in fact how we get stronger, through coping with life’s challenges." A daily bout of anxiety related to marriage, kids, or a job, he adds, kicks off a body’s fight-or-flight mechanism, which can "sharpen our focus a bit." He explains the benefits of a rousing round of good stress: "From a psychological perspective, the person who has a certain amount of, let’s call it manageable daily stress, they’re kinda like problem-solving people. They get revved up by some challenge at work or home." On the other hand, he says, those who are more chill on a daily basis may be poised for panic when the shit hits the fan: "If they’re hit with a major problem that they can’t deny or avoid, they are more vulnerable. That person gets devastated."

We’ll keep that in mind at the family dinner table this week, amid fast-flying snits, passive-aggressive verbal battles, and a few drinks too many.

Stress is good, stress is good, stress is good ...

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

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