Stress is ubiquitous in twenty- rst century Britain, responsible for millions of lost working days and the focus of a whole industry designed to help us avoid it.2 It was not always thus. is chapter explores how people such as James Lyon, quoted above talking about his work in the oil industry in the 1970s, experienced ‘stress and stu like that’ in the period between the Second World War and the 1980s, and in particular stress related to their work. By tracing peoples’ shi ing attitudes towards stressful experiences, examining how they explained those experiences and analyzing the reactions of others to them, this chapter will highlight three key areas of discussion. Firstly, it examines the complex interplay of factors such as status, identity and gender in shaping attempts to make sense of stress. Secondly, it explores continuities and discontinuities in understandings of mental health problems among both su erers and colleagues across a forty year period. Finally, it re ects on what appears to be a surprising lack of popular awareness of stress in the 1970s despite the work of Hans Selye , Richard Lazarus and others to popularize the concept from the 1950s, and an increasingly prominent discourse around stress within the popular print media.3