The biological definition of stress is the failure of our body to respond appropriately to a real or imaginary threat, either emotional or physical. An appropriate response to fear or anxiety is either to overcome the threat somehow or to escape it – the ‘fight or flight’ reaction. When we’re stressed, we do neither of these things. Instead we stay facing the threat without dealing with it.

When we’re afraid, our bodies produce more adrenaline to put us into a state of high alertness and tension. This helps us to either fight or flee the threat. If we don’t do either of these things, but remain in our anxious state, our bodies continue to produce more adrenaline than they would if we were calm. This leads to a build up of tension that causes the long term effects of living under stress.

Many of the everyday events of our lives cause us low level stress. The noise and pollution of living in a city, the constant dangers of crossing the road or driving a car are all mild stressors (causes of stress). Living in a family where arguments between children or spouses are a regular occurrence is an emotional stressor.

Until 50 or 60 years ago, the word ’stress’ was not used at all in the sense we use it today. It was a scientific term used only for a force which caused strain in metals and other elements in physics. It was the Austrian-born Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye who coined the term in its modern sense in his research into the way the body’s gland secretions work in challenging situations.

At first Hans Selye used the word to describe a very limited physical response. Later, by the 1950s, he expanded his research to cover more everyday occurrences. He wrote a book called ‘Stress Of Life’ which became a bestseller, and he moved away from scientific research to give lecture tours and popularize his theories. His work became very well known and the word ’stress’ entered our daily language. At the same time it was taken up by other languages with virtually no change, so that ’stress’ is one of the few words that can be understood in most countries of the world.

In the 1960s stress began to be researched by psychologists as well as biologists. They tried to discover what kind of life events caused the most stress, how it was linked to disease and how different personality types dealt with the stresses that they encountered in life.

Following on from that, stress in the workplace or at home became recognized as a cause of absence from work. This prompted large corporations to fund research into stress management techniques. This is how the definition of stress changed from its use in engineering science to what we understand by the term today.

When you see other things than two dolphins …

 

… then you are stressed  

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