Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky explains that short bursts of stress — like a roller coaster ride — are invigorating, while long periods of stress damage the hippocampus. From To Survive Stress, Keep It Brief:
“It’s easy to say, ‘Aha! The answer is having no stress in my life!’ ” But the idea that we should — or could — live without it, he said, is “nonsense.”The body’s reaction to stress can become chronic and pernicious. This doesn’t happen because a physical threat to safety continues for a long time, but because humans — endowed with imagination, memory and language — have the ability to create psychological stress, even when no physical or emotional threat is present. Sapolsky, author of the book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” calls this “adventitious suffering — the pain of what was, what will be, what could be or what someone else is experiencing.”
The body makes no distinction between immediate, in-your-face stressors and chronic, in-your-imagination ones, Sapolsky said. Faced with either kind of threat, the body reacts, and when the threat is sustained psychologically, the physically destructive stress response continues.