The Good News About Anxiety

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“Having a child, getting a new job, winning a sports game or performing in front of people — those are all stressful,” says Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who researches stress. “If we didn’t engage with stress, if we just tried to avoid it, we really wouldn’t do anything that was innovative.”

Research on both humans and monkeys has found that enduring a small number of adverse events, such as a loved one’s illness or a parent’s divorce, can result in better mental health than experiencing either lots of adversity — or no adversity at all. Even severe misfortunes, such as bereavement, have an eventual silver lining by contributing to resilience. (Though this number is very approximate, Mark Seery, a psychologist at the University of Buffalo, said his research suggests that five adverse events across a lifetime seems like the happy medium.)

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): The Washington Post