ABSTRACT
There can be few popular Psychological terms which have become so hazy as ‘stress’. Essentially, of course, it refers to a state caused by being subject to excessive demands on one’s emotions and/or time which render it difficult to function effectively in all areas of life. This can result in a host of symptoms such as depression, chronic tiredness, bad temper, anxiety, impotency and lowered quality of work-performance. It is, however, accepted in Psychology that it is a very vague term for a broad sweep of real-life situations. The first move to bring order to the scene is, as so often, to differentiate between stress caused by external ‘stressors’ (e.g. an impending work interview or exam) and by internal factors (such as conflicted emotional feelings towards a partner or having to reconcile work and domestic life or conflicting roles). The different responses to stress have also been studied intensely in recent years, especially in health Psychology, since these can be as diverse as heavy drinking and psychosomatic illness. Disentangling physiological and hormonal aspects of stress from purely psychological ones is another important issue. Stress is not therefore a distinct unitary phenomenon but something of a catch-all term. But while psychologists now mostly understand this, in the world at large it has come to function as a sort for universal explanation for psychological discontents and malaise of almost every kind. Stress is real enough, but the word itself often masks as much as it reveals about what is actually going on. For the linguistically minded, the New Oxford English Dictionary takes over seven columns to cover the noun form of ‘stress’, the Psychological/biological sense we are concerned with being definition I 3g. While I 1a, dating back to the Middle Ages, is very similar, referring to affliction (and closely related to ‘distress’), sense I 3g dates only to 1942, and most other senses are in one way or another physical. There is a large related literature, much of it either medical or of the popular ‘self-help’ and ‘coping’ kind.
