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Stressors

More than 50 years ago Hans Selye, a Canadian endocrinologist, defined stress as “the nonspecific response of the body to any demand.” In laboratory experiments, Selye exposed rats to a variety of noxious chemicals and extreme environmental conditions that he labeled “demands.” The environmental demands included freezing temperatures, constant light, deafening noise, and nonstop exercise via motor-driven treadmills and constant swimming to avoid drowning. Selye found that when these demands threw the rats' normal operating systems (respiration, circulation, digestion, and temperature regulation) too far out of their normal range of functioning, they adjusted by initiating a complex pattern of physiological changes that he called the “stress response.” Not only did the rats initiate this life-saving response, but the response was the same regardless of the type of demand that triggered it. Selye called this phenomenon the “nonspecific response to any demand.” Besides rats, Selye replicated the response with mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, and other laboratory animals. The nonspecificity of the response to any demand was the key factor in the development of Selye's stress theory.

What are Stressors?

Researchers since Selye often refer to demands as stressors. Stressors are the people, things, and situations that create unusual or excessive demands on people, leaving them feeling threatened and unable to cope. Most people suffer from social stressors associated with work, school, relationships, family life, and world events rather than extreme environmental demands like those created by Selye in the laboratory.

Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, pioneers in the study of life events and their link to stress, identified a relationship between stressful occurrences and susceptibility to illness. They examined the past medical records of their subjects and discovered that the development of serious illnesses often followed major life changes. They used the term life events to refer to these life-changing experiences. Some of these events were positive (eustress)—marriage, the birth of a child, a new job—while others were negative (distress)—the death of a loved one, the loss of a job.

Holmes and Rahe found that exposure to these positive and negative life events throws the body's systems out of balance, triggering the stress response. Like Selye, they believed that the stress response was the body's way of readjusting to stressors. Additionally, they believed that the body had a finite amount of energy available to make these readjustments to adapt to stressors. Exposure to too many life events in a short a period of time increased one's risk for the development of disease.

The Role of Perception in Stressors

In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers in the field of cognitive psychology took issue with the notion of the comparability of eustress and distress. They also questioned the belief that the life events identified by Holmes and Rahe were universal stressors for everyone under all circumstances.

Richard Lazarus, a pioneer in this research, found that people responded to life events differently, depending on how they perceived them and on their ability to cope with them. Lazarus and his colleague Susan Folkman established that some subjects perceived life events such as divorce as very stressful, while others didn't view them as stressful at all. Such events are stressful only if people appraise them as threatening and feel unable to cope with them. Until that determination, life events and other demands are potential stressors.

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