to work to get back into a state
of good health,” Selye wrote at
the end of the test. The system
had an appealing reductive-
ness to it—stress management
as calorie counting—but was
largely useless in practice.
The truth is, we don’t have a
complete fix for stress today—
the fight-or-flight system is
simply embedded too deeply
in the human genome to be de-
coded easily. But we do have
palliatives—more and more of
them: we know the power of
exercise as a stress reducer; of
building a social support net-
work; of diet as a route to overall wellness; of es-
tablishing unthreatening workplaces; of cognitive-
behavioral therapy to reframe goals and stakes and
dangers. We know as well of newly fashionable—
and wonderfully powerful—approaches such as
mindfulness and meditation and yoga. And, impor-
tantly, we know how to diagnose the physical signs
of stress earlier and to intervene in time.
What we don’t yet know, but can learn, is a
means to embrace the good that Selye did recognize
about stress: a species born on the savanna could
never have made it off if it didn’t know how to
turn anxiety into initiative. To turn fretfulness into
focus. There are ways to tame and master stress—
and in so doing, to make sure it never masters us. •difference between the brac-
ing, motivating tension you
feel when you’re prepar-
ing an important presenta-
tion and the corrosive tension
you feel when you lie awake
at night worrying about bills.
On the other axis are hyper-
stress (the tightly wound ten-
sion that never goes away) and
hypostress (an actual deficit
of stress that makes it hard to
bestir yourself to do the work
that needs to be done). Balance
both of those teeter-totters just
so, and you can calibrate your
stress levels perfectly. Nice—
only Selye could never say quite how anyone was
supposed to achieve that ideal.
Other investigators sought at least to measure
and predict stress. In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas
Holmes and Richard Rahe introduced the Social
Readjustment Rating Scale (later called the Holmes
and Rahe scale), which ranked 43 common stress-
ors, from death of a spouse at the top, to chang-
ing career in the middle, to a minor violation of the
law, such as a speeding ticket, at the bottom. Each
was then assigned a score in “life change units”
(100 for widowhood; 36 for the work switch; 10
for the ticket). The more life change units you ac-
cumulated in a year, the greater your risk of illness
was. “The higher your score, the harder you have
75% OF
AMERICANS
report having
experienced
moderate to high
levels of stress
within the past
month.