Eustress

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /juːˈstɹɛs/

Definitions

1. A constructive form of mental strain induced by positive challenges that stimulates personal development and improves functioning
2. A healthy psychological response to demanding situations that motivates action and produces feelings of fulfillment and capability
3. A beneficial type of stress that encourages motivation and supports personal improvement

Etymology: Hans Selye, the Austro-Hungarian endocrinologist, spent decades studying stress in laboratory animals and was credited with popularising the word in its modern sense. The word that gave him the opposite idea was already in use: "distress" had long meant suffering or hardship. Selye needed a term for stress that helped rather than harmed, and he built it from the Greek prefix "eu-", meaning "good" or "well", attached to the familiar "stress". The coinage was made by contrast with "distress". Speakers tended to read that word as if it were "dys-" plus "stress", "dys-" being the Greek prefix for "bad" or "ill", and "eustress" was formed as its mirror image. The result is a word whose meaning depends entirely on a pairing: the same pressure, feeling like a challenge rather than a threat, becomes the good half of a split that the language had not previously drawn.

Synonyms: positive stress, beneficial stress

Antonyms: distress, negative stress