Keyse (2000) defines stress as the non-specific response of the body to any demands placed on it. The authors further note that stress can come from external factors (e.g., being present at a bank robbery, witnessing a terrorist attack, losing a job, etc) or from internal factors such as persistently feeling that one is not earning peer acceptance at school, or sufficient respect in the workplace. However, one rather interesting fact about stress is that even with the same external stressors, not everybody will be placed under the same degree of stress or even experience stress at all (Kalat, 2001).
One reason why people differ in terms of whether or not they experience stress over the same or over a similar event is due to how they think; a fact that has led some psychologists to speculate that stress may be caused by thoughts or the mind (see: Sternberg, 2002). The thesis of this paper is that there are sound reasons supporting the notion that stress is caused, at least in part, by a person's mind or way of thinking. The research and literature supporting this thesis is reviewed here.
Stress is Caused by the Mind: Supportive Research and Theory
While it is impossible to leave the body out of any theory of stress, one theory that does tie the mind into body mechanisms in terms of producing stress is what is known as the "Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress." According to Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith (2002), stress is a necessary body alarm but it occurs within a complex cognitive system. The psychobiological mechanisms are said to be sensitization in neural loops maintained by sustained attention and arousal. However, the theory notes that often (although not always), the sustained attention and arousal is caused by the person's way of thinking. In other words, it is the person's decision to think in certain ways that maintains the body at a high level of stress.
In terms of thought, cognitive activation theory h...