Four-Letter-Word: Making the Most of Stress - a podcast by Ty Brown

Have you ever thought about how pressure and stress can benefit your dog?

As humans, we tend to label “stress” a four-letter-word. But if you really think about it, there is no such thing as growth in the living world without it! The plant that springs out of the earth has to push forward through difficulty to get itself out of the soil, fight for resources like air and water and sunlight. In pushing through those stresses, it survives. If it cannot cope or adapt to the pressures that its environment gives it, then it will die.

You can look at any creature in the animal kingdom—chipmunks and killer whales and everything in between—and see the same pattern. Growth can only be seen after pressure and stress do their work, because the natural world never just hands you growth. We humans like to think of ourselves as far more civilized, but the same is true for us: there is no such thing as growth without stress. When a kid feels the pressure to succeed, she might go to college and work hard there. Perhaps she makes success for herself, and perhaps she doesn’t. That’s life!

Even though any sort of short- or long-term growth can only come about as a result of stress, we still need to pay attention to our stress level in order to stay healthy. If we don’t have any way of turning off our pressures or relieving the stresses we feel, then we go nuts! Neglecting to come up with ways to adapt to the stress can lead to serious problems. The same is true of every other living thing: if you can’t cope, you won’t thrive. In the animal kingdom, you might even die.

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