Today, people are under stress, and they talk about the stress they are under. The concept of "stress" is so firmly entrenched in the communal psyche that few people have paused to analyze it, and most people assume that it is simply a fact of modern life, beyond anyone's control. Elizabeth Stark (1992) in her article, "Stress: It's All Relative . . . and Relatively Easy to Manage", attempted to provide information on stress that would help people understand and control it, with mixed results.
Stark's primary thesis is that stress is relative--what one person might consider stressful in a negative way, another might view positively, seeing it as a challenge or a thrill. Stark cites studies done on high school athletes with "Type T," or thrill-seeking, personalities, which indicate that such students were less prone to injury-related absences. The conclusion was that such students, motivated by their thrill-seeking personalities, were "more tolerant of negative events" (p. 163). Resistance to stress can come from a variety of factors. One is personality, such as that seen in "Type T" people, mentioned above. Another is biology. The ability to resist stress may be genetic, or, conversely, genes may make people prone to particular sorts of stress-related illnesses (p. 163). A third source of stress resistance--or, more precisely, stress management--is simply acquiring the ability to recognize stressful situations and learning how to deal with stress successfully. Stark's major goal in the article is to convince people that these are skills which anyone can acquire, regardless of temperamental or genetic disposition toward stress.
Stark offers a number of tips for reducing stress. One is simply to learn to distinguish stressful things--"stressors"--which can be controlled from those which cannot. From there, one can learn skills to take control over at least some stressors and, ideally, reduce or eliminate them. An...