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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic that stress makes it harder to sleep then. I find exercise (running) to be very helpful, if I try to sleep when I'm upset or stressed I can't, or best case I sleep briefly if I'm really tired and then wake up and start worrying too much to sleep again.

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Stress is not an emotion but a complex and very broad and vague mental and physical state.

> very broad and vague mental and physical state

Aren't all emotions? I guess it depends what you define as emotion. Pain is a feeling and very simple, if it's physical. Emotional pain is different and can be very complex.

I think emotions are more a philosophical matter while stress is more medical. Stress in general is a heightened state with respect to a basal rest state. It’s mentioned a lot nowadays but I think it’s too unspecific to be useful as it doesn’t allow for much introspection. Emotions can be dissected, felt, recalled, and analyzed by oneself.

How does that differ from, say, anger or sadness?

As I understand it, emotions are a representation of a train of thought which may or may not then cause physiological effects. If I’m watching a sad movie, feeling the emotion of sadness may not stress me. It may actually be exhilarating because it’s allowed me to feel an emotion that I hadn’t felt in some time. Stress on the other hand is by definition an effect which may have many causes. Think stress of materials. An emotion may be one but also trauma or even a tumor.

I agree except about the vague part- it's trivial to measure stress through BP, heart rate, and other physiological measurements.

I can reach those values by exercising or even constricting muscles (e.g. sphincter) but you wouldn’t say that I’m stressed. Stress as I understand it is a complex state characterized by among others, excess anxiety, increased basal metabolic rate, heightened awareness. Essentially an increase in most dimensions from a basal rest state.

Usually what is really meant by stress is a state of chronic sympathetic arousal / insufficient parasympathetic activation

(I agree that people use the word vaguely and in a lot of different ways)

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