Stress in the 21st Century
“Stress is an epidemic in the 21st century and impacts on people’s behaviour in many ways. Discuss in light of the literature.”
Stress is a term that is frequently used in everyday conversation. The conventional meaning of the word stress – too much to do, too much to worry about – was not part of the vocabulary some fifty years ago. In the 1930s the Hungarian scientist Hans Selye, the godfather of stress research, took an engineering concept and applied it to humans 1. Stress in general refers to force exerted on a system. In human terms however it would more correctly refer to circumstances that either threaten or are perceived to be threatening to a person’s wellbeing and consequently be taxing on their ability to cope with these circumstances 2.
There is also stress which is not as particularized or subjective, such as ambient stress. This stress encompasses situations like constant environmental conditions which are difficult, if not impossible, to control by the individual, i.e. excessive noise, traffic, pollution and crowding2. According to Ewart and Suchday’s, researchers 6 who developed a scale called City Stress Inventory (CSI), urban poverty and violence can also be considered as sources of environmental stress 2.
An important point to make is that the perception of a threat can be as stressing as an actual threat and the body and brain can react in exactly the same way as a result. Body and mind relationship have been studied by medical researchers for a long time now. The so-called placebo effect is a good example of this phenomenon where in clinical experiments, people who are given inert substances made to look like medicines, such as a sugar pill, often experience the same health improvement as those patients who are given real medication. Researchers have also noted that some conditions and illnesses have no physical explanations. Doctors classify these conditions as psychosomatic, as they seem to be caused by the psyche 8.
Stress is a term that is frequently used in everyday conversation. The conventional meaning of the word stress – too much to do, too much to worry about – was not part of the vocabulary some fifty years ago. In the 1930s the Hungarian scientist Hans Selye, the godfather of stress research, took an engineering concept and applied it to humans 1. Stress in general refers to force exerted on a system. In human terms however it would more correctly refer to circumstances that either threaten or are perceived to be threatening to a person’s wellbeing and consequently be taxing on their ability to cope with these circumstances 2.
There is also stress which is not as particularized or subjective, such as ambient stress. This stress encompasses situations like constant environmental conditions which are difficult, if not impossible, to control by the individual, i.e. excessive noise, traffic, pollution and crowding2. According to Ewart and Suchday’s, researchers 6 who developed a scale called City Stress Inventory (CSI), urban poverty and violence can also be considered as sources of environmental stress 2.
An important point to make is that the perception of a threat can be as stressing as an actual threat and the body and brain can react in exactly the same way as a result. Body and mind relationship have been studied by medical researchers for a long time now. The so-called placebo effect is a good example of this phenomenon where in clinical experiments, people who are given inert substances made to look like medicines, such as a sugar pill, often experience the same health improvement as those patients who are given real medication. Researchers have also noted that some conditions and illnesses have no physical explanations. Doctors classify these conditions as psychosomatic, as they seem to be caused by the psyche 8.
References: 1. Bruce McEwen with Elizabeth Norton Lasley, ‘The End of Stress As We Know It’ Joseph Henry Press, Washington D.C., 2002. 2. W. Weiten, M.A. Lloyd, D.S. Dunn & E.Y. Hammer, Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century (9th Edn.) Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. 3. Sheldon Cohen, Ronald C. Kessler & Lynn Underwood Gordon (Eds), ‘Measuring Stress: A Guide for Health and Social Scientists’, Oxford University Press, USA, 1997. 4. Richard S. Lazarus, & Susan. Folkman, ‘Stress, appraisal and coping’, New York: Springer, 1984. 5. Salvatore R Maddi, & Suzanne C Kobasa, The Hardy Executive: Health Under Stress, Homewood, Ill.: Dow ones-Irwin, 1984. 6. Dr. Craig K Ewart & Dr. Sonia Suchday, ‘Discovering how urban poverty and violence affect health: Development and validation of a neighbourhood stress index’, Health Psychology, 2002, 21, p. 254-262. 7. Shelley E Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-deception and the Healthy Mind, New York: Basic Books, 1989. 8. David G Myers, Psychology (4th Ed.), Hope College, Holland, Michigan: Worth Publishers, 1995. 11. Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers (third ed.), New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004.