I’ll give it a shot.

Useful stress is something you can relieve through action. You study and learn the thing, and pass the test. Or you have that difficult conversation. Once you go through it, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment (sorry).

Useless stress is what you feel when you’ve think you’re going to lose your job, or a loved one is sick, or a brush fire is burning a mile away from your house. It’s out of your control and the stress you’re under can’t be harnessed in a useful way. It just sucks.

I like this clarification.

If you work out for half an hour and then get off the treadmill, you feel great and accomplished. This is a manageable amount of stress.

But for comparison, imagine if you have to run on that treadmill day after day after day, only getting off for regimented breaks and the bare minimum amount of rest required, and you are only allowed two weeks of vacation a year and then it's back to the treadmill. And if you ever stop running on the treadmill, you lose your house and ability to feed yourself and provide care for your family... It gradually wears your soul down to a nub.

> And if you ever stop running on the treadmill, you lose your house and ability to feed yourself and provide care for your family...

Not to mention: if, in a moment of weakness, you slow down on a treadmill, braking braces on your legs kick in and start giving resistance, making running harder. Thus any kind of slack or mishap becomes a permanent handicap.

Yes, that's called "overtraining". :)

This... plus there’s a time element too.

New challenges that one faces might be physiologically stressful, but if they are within your scope to meet and overcome, can also be incredibly motivating - aka ‘good stress’.

In my view they become ‘bad stress’ if they are either prolonged (thereby wearing your resilience down) or due to your circumstances you have no power or opportunity to meaningfully meet and overcome them.

You can also look at how it influences you, like bad stress in making you unable to cope and can cause some mental health issues. At one point there can be just too much, in dog training that is called threshold and individuals have their own capacity. So 3 life events that you would handle no problem separately, could be way worse when they happen at once.

I never feel stressed about a really annoying and thorny programming problem, no matter how frustrating it is or seemly insurmountable it is. Ditto for learning anything new.

Yet, I would feel stressed about grades and passing, which is entirely different from actual mastery.

A difficult programming problem in isolation is something I, too, enjoy.

There's no enjoyment though when the project manager (any other exec) demands that it be solved within a very short time. This is no time for eustress, when I'm being asked for status updates twice a day for 5 days.