A few years ago I watched a Netflix documentary on stress titled "Stress, Portrait of a Killer" and it kind of opened my eyes to the reality and risks of stress of bad stress.
If interested, you can watch it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/eYG0ZuTv5rs
A few key take aways:
Our perception on where we rank within our social hierarchy and how much control we feel we have seems to be related to how we perceive and respond to potential stressors. If we feel good about where we are compared to the world around us and we feel like we have control, we experience less stress. If we don't feel good or we don't feel in control, we will experience more stress.
Humans respond to daily stressors (bills, traffic, people, work) and other psychological stress with a similar fight or flight response that a buffalo does when getting chased by a lion. Physiologically our adrenaline kicks in and our heart rate increases, but the difference is, when a buffalo is no longer in danger, they resume a calm state and we don't. We become consumed by the stress; we think about it... we talk about... and some people just can't shut it down.
Not only does stress hurt us and others in the moment, but when we don't manage it, it pollutes our body, hurts our immune system, makes us more susceptible to disease and shortens our life. It literally kills us.
With the work I do, stress management resiliency has become a pretty key talk track with clients. There is good stress and bad stress and we don't function at our potential, personally and professionally when we aren't managing the bad stress.