As an example eating a whole cake is generally considered unhealthy and a bad kind of stress for the body do to excessive calories and the glicemic level increase. Same thing when it comes to not sleeping enough.
Exercising and other activities on the other side are seen as fundamental to live a healthy life.
What exactly determines the difference? Is it just a matter of whether or not our body can “improve” following the stimuli? And why does our reactions varies so broadly?
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Stress might be the wrong way of thinking about your question. Some stressors are positive and adaptive because you could say it’s a stress or pain signal that gets us to quickly move our hand off a hot stove to protect ourselves. It’s generally chronic stress that is negative and not self-preserving like our response to acute stress.
Using your example, eating a cake might spike insulin but I don’t even think I’d call that a stressor. What might be a stressor is years of eating cakes non-stop and getting atherosclerosis or high cholesterol because this is a chronic, non-adaptive change that our body can’t necessarily overcome on its own.
Exercise is a stressor, but it is short term and has an adaptive response- it helps us regulate blood sugar, convert fat to energy, lower blood pressure in the long term, etc. It is adaptive in the sense that our body naturally knows how to convert this “stress” into something that preserves our health, just like taking your hand away from a hot stove so you don’t burn
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