What is Stress?
Dr. Hans Seyle, a Canadian physician and researcher, is considered the father of stress management because of his pioneering research in the field. He defines stress as, “ the body’s nonspecific response to any demand placed on it, whether or not that demand is pleasant” (Seyle, 1976 Pg. 54). Seyle discovered that people’s bodies exhibit a specific series of biological reaction in response to some demand or threat. The surprise is that people’s bodies go through the same reaction in positive as well as negative situations. The same physical reaction occurs if people cut off in traffic, or given a surprise party by the friends. The body does not know the difference between positive and negative events. Only the mind does.
In his pioneering work on stress, Thomas Holmes proposed that all change is stressful because it forces people to adapt to new, unfamiliar circumstances (Holmes and Rahe, 1967). Holmes acknowledged that some changes require more adjustment than do others. Nevertheless, he believed that the change produced by positive life events as well as by negative ones is stressful and can damage a person’s health. This perspective generated a great deal of research and a great deal of controversy. Are positive and negative events functionally equivalent because both produce changes in people’s lives? Do they have similar effects on health?
Probably not. It now appears that positive and negative life events have different implications for stress and coping. One reason for this difference lies in the nature of emotional experience. With some exceptions (Green et.al, 1993), most researchers believe that positive and negative emotions are distinct and relatively independent (Goldstein and Strube, 1994). Happiness is not the absence of distress, nor is distress the absence of happiness, and a person can have both feelings simultaneously. Thus, the emotional consequences of positive and negative life events run on separate tracks........................
