History of Stress

So how did the concept of stress come to be? The term “stress” was used as early as 1914 by Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon. But his concept was different than ours today. As Becker notes in One Nation Under Stress, “Cannon described stress in terms of heat, hunger, oxygen deprivation and other phenomena that can cause predictable physiological responses.”He concluded that in response to fear and fury, our bodies released adrenalin and our heartbeat and blood sugar increased. But our bodies would always return to “homeostasis,” or keep “on an even course.”  Remnants of this theory do live on today. According to Becker in her book:

“…it is generally agreed that, after Cannon, all stress theories were based at least in part on his ideas about homeostasis. Cannon’s work lives on in the popular idea that there is an ongoing battle between our out-of-date physiology and the demands of modern life. We make biological ‘adjustments’ that are no longer functional: we react to an angry boss the way our Stone Age counterparts reacted to a saber-tooth tiger, but we can’t run away…”It was Czech-born endocrinologist Hans Selye who popularized the concept of stress. At first, Selye used the term “stress” much like Cannon did. But by 1950, Becker writes, “he was describing stress as a ‘response to a condition evoked by stressors.’” In his book The Stress of Life, which Selye penned for the public, he refers to stress as “the rate of wear and tear caused by life.” He also made the connection between stress and disease.

Selye was a master marketer of stress. According to Becker in her book, “A tireless promoter of the stress concept, Selye sold and resold it over the years in popular and professional venues – in his best-selling books The Story of the Adaptation Syndrome and The Stress of Life, in talks to doctors’ groups in Canada and the United States, and at meetings of the American Psychological Association.But Selye was so good that while the public accepted stress as a prominent concept, his specific theories got lost. In fact, “…the ‘truth’ of the stress concept and the American embrace of it did not come about through scientific agreement or through medical cures for ‘stress-related’ diseases. It was stress’s popularity that made it ‘true,’” Becker writes.

References

Freud, S. (1909b). Bemerkungen über einen Fall von Zwangsneurose (Der "Rattenmann"). Jb. psychoanal. psychopathol. Forsch., I, p. 357-421; GW, VII, p. 379-463; Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis, SE, 10: 151-318.