Healthline: Jennifer King, assistant professor and co-director of the Center on Trauma and Adversity at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, said that sometimes stress isn’t all a bad thing. “It’s what helps us learn and grow,” she said. “Our internal stress alarm rings any time we are going to do something new—like take a test, go on a date, or have a job interview.” When stresses are small and predictable, our bodies can respond to the stress and then return to baseline quickly, she said.
