Generalized Anxiety Disorder ❧ 127BuSpar, a newer serotonergic drug, was developed to control gen-
eralized anxiety without addictive potential. In some cases, it works
well, but it doesn’t make much of a dent in the levels of anxiety I see in
clinical practice.
For anxiety about a specific performance, beta blockers—drugs usually
used to calm the circulatory system and lower blood pressure—are
sometimes effective.
Medications can calm people enough so they can begin learning to
calm themselves, or at least begin to recognize that the source of their
pain is their own imagination.
The Passive Strategy: Being Stressed Out
Stress, like many other concepts from psychology that have drifted into
popular culture, has lost its specificity and now has vastly different meanings,
depending on who is using it. Stresscan be a verb or a noun, a cause or
effect, internal or external, friend or foe.
Before we talk more about strategies to control stress, we have to
come to some agreement about what it is. Is stress dangerous, a hidden
killer to be eliminated on sight? Is it just a part of life, to be endured as
best we can? Or could it actually be good for us?
The answer is: All of the above.
Stress is merely a load on the system—anything that gets our hearts
going and our breathing rate up. Sex, walking up stairs, or making a pre-
sentation to a group of shareholders are all forms of stress. Any of them
can wear us out or build us up, depending on how we handle them. Stress,
like exercise, can make us stronger if we take it in regular, increasing doses.
Actually, exercise is a form of stress that everyone agrees is beneficial.
So why does stress have such a bad connotation?
Back in the 1950s the idea that psychological turmoil could influence
physical disease was fairly radical in medicine. Psychiatrists and psychol-
ogists had been saying as much for years, but the “real” doctors were not
convinced. Many thought that there were as yet undiscovered physical
causes for psychological symptoms, rather than the other way around.
In 1950, Hans Selye, an endocrinologist, was the first to use the word
stressas we think of it today, meaning a physical or emotional factor that