Introduction
It is hard to determine precisely when the history of the stress concept begins (for an overview, see e.g., Kugelmann, 1992; Doublet, 2000; Cooper and Dewe, 2004; Jackson, 2013). Predecessors like George M. Beard’s “neurasthenia” or Walter B. Cannon’s idea of “homeostasis” can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century (Beard, 1869; Cannon, 1929). Note, that the “godfather of stress,” Hans Selye, did not use the term stress in his first publication about the general adaptation syndrome (GAS; Selye, 1936). Although the GAS is generally considered the starting point for the development of his stress theory, it was not before the 1950s that stress was regularly adopted as a scientific term. As Kugelmann (1992, p. 54) put it: “Before the war [i.e., the Second World War], no one spoke of stress; after it, increasingly, everyone did.” However, what is stress believed to be, after all?
This question is not easy to answer as stress is not a narrow term with a fixed meaning: “Stress is a term that causes psychologists headaches. There is a great deal of controversy over what the term means” (Martin et al., 2013, p. 682). Hans Selye, for instance, changed his definition of stress several times (Viner, 1999; Jackson, 2013). More generally speaking, stress is either seen as an aversive stimulus we are exposed to, as the response we show in reaction to this stimulus or as an interactional process, assuming that it is the “lack of fit between the environment and a person” (Mulhall, 1996, p. 459) that makes certain situations stressful. Apart from that, the concept of stress connects research findings from genetics, biology, medicine, and psychology and relates them not only to the individual but also to institutional and societal structures. Thus, stress seems to be a very broad, notoriously fuzzy, and versatile, a “protean concept” (Becker, 2013, p. 2) - a concept that is able to “incorporate a wide range of themes” (Pollock, 1988, p. 387). Put differently, the way that the stress concept is defined and investigated depends on the specific approach and the interests of the individual researcher.
However, this overall impression does not help to answer the question as to whether there is at least some consensus about what stress actually is. What might help is to look at various introductory books to psychology and to see how stress is defined there. Such an approach does not necessarily reveal the “truth” about stress. As textbooks provide a condensed summary of the current academic discourse, they can nevertheless give us a good impression of the way stress is commonly understood in contemporary psychology (see e.g., Smyth, 2004, for an elaboration of how stress as a concept emerged in psychology textbooks). Interestingly, the definitions used in the textbooks seem to share three crucial features.
First, all of them roughly describe stress as the notion that things are getting too much and out of balance. People are stressed out because of “specific events or chronic pressures that place demands on a person or threaten the person’s well-being” (Schacter et al., 2014, p. 550; for similar descriptions, see Eysenck, 2009, p. 87; Martin et al., 2013, p. 682; Ciccarelli and White, 2018, p. 462). Stress “is the pattern of response an organism makes to stimulus events that disturb its equilibrium and tax or exceed its ability to cope” (Gerrig, 2013, p. 333). In other words, “[s]tress occurs when aspects of the environment overwhelm people. That is, people feel stressed when too much is expected of them, or when events seem scary or worrisome” (Gazzaniga and Heatherton, 2003, p. 336).
Second, the individual’s response to stress is viewed as a complex pattern, which “is made up of a diverse combination of reactions taking place on several levels, including physiological, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive” (Gerrig, 2013, p. 333; similar descriptions can be found in Gazzaniga and Heatherton, 2003, p. 334; Eysenck, 2009, p. 87; Schacter et al., 2014, p. 550; Ciccarelli and White, 2018, p. 462). As Martin et al. (2013, p. 682) puts it: “In general terms, stress is a pattern of physiological, behavioural, emotional, and cognitive responses to real or imagined stimuli that are perceived as preventing a goal or endangering or otherwise threatening well-being.” Expressed differently, the inseparable combination of physiological and psychological factors is what constitutes stress.
Third, stress is believed to be “a common component of everyday emotional life” (Gazzaniga and Heatherton, 2003, p. 334) as “[e]very organism faces challenges from its external environment and from its personal needs” (Gerrig, 2013, p. 332), ranging from major life events, such as a natural catastrophe or the death of a close family member to daily hassles, which are all those “personal events that affect the comfortable pattern of our lives and little annoyances that bug us day after day” (Schacter et al., 2014, p. 550). Expressed more philosophically: “Life is really about change. Every day, each person faces some kind of challenge, big or small” (Ciccarelli and White, 2018, p. 462). From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, one might add the following: “Stress is not a direct product of cultural evolution but is a product of natural selection. It is a behavioural adaptation that helped our ancestors to fight or to flee from wild animals and enemies” (Eysenck, 2009, p. 87; Martin et al., 2013, p. 682). Thus, stress appears as a universal mechanism, which is not restricted to certain times and cultures.
If stress indeed is a universal mechanism consisting of a combination of physiological and psychological responses that people show when things are getting too much and out of balance, one could ask how stress levels have developed over the course of time and whether people living in our modern era are more stressed out than they used to be in pre-industrial societies. The first section (“The Stress of Life”) addresses this question by sketching out different lines of reasoning. However, the second section (“Being Stressed Out as a Way to Be a Person”) attempts to explain why comparing the hardships of the past and the present in order to conclude whether ancient or contemporary lives are more stressful is potentially problematic. Building on the framework suggested by Hacking (2007), I argue that being stressed out has become, but has not always been, a way to be a person. If this is the case, the assumption that stress is a universal mechanism seems questionable. Stress may be universal in the sense that people from all times and cultures (at least sometimes) have the experience that things are getting too much and out of balance. However, the way that people deal with this experience, that is, the way that people connect physiological and psychological responses, differs across times and cultures, making the stress concept highly context-dependent. This distinction is elaborated in the third section (“Stress as a Universal Mechanism?”). The final section of the paper (“The Importance of Putting Stress into Context”) discusses three reasons why we should be cautious when using the term “stress” in order to analyze the past. In short, the concept of stress can only be properly understood when put in historical context. In addition, such a contextualization may also help us to understand the functioning of our present-day societies.
