Stressing Out, A Good Thing?

It’s most likely that someone else has blogged about something like this. But I just recently found a new story about the benefits of stress.

Some might figure that anxious people tend to make batter decisions. Gregory Samanes-Larkin, a graduate student in philosophy at Stanford, ran an experiment which involved scanning the brains of healthy people without anxiety disorders and watched as the anterior insula, a part of the brain, lit up when patients anticipated losing money. The more anxious patients showed even more activity in that particular section of the brain.

The second part of the experiment brought the same people back to play a computer game for real cash. The more anxious people were better at learning how to avoid losing money.

What do you think? Have you ever felt you had the “perfect” amount of stress or anxiousness?