It took strain to discover stress

Whether avoiding predators in the bush or in the office, humans have always had to cope with stress. But use of the word to mean that familiar clammy-handed, racing-heart, jumpy-tense feeling was coined less than a century ago.

Elena Conis

*

Hans Selye was a 19-year-old medical student at the University of Prague in 1926 when he first asked a simple question: Why do sick people, no matter their disease, share the same basic symptoms: sluggishness, weakness and loss of appetite?

The question lingered in the back of his mind and eventually led him to be the first to describe the body’s response to emotionally difficult events.

A very different strand of study led him there: the search for an undiscovered sex hormone. While working as a research assistant at McGill University in 1936, Selye collected ovaries from freshly killed cows, turned the still-warm organs into liquid extracts and injected the concoction into female rats.

The rats responded with swollen adrenal glands, bleeding ulcers and immune glands that shriveled or wasted away. Selye thought he was on the verge of finding the sought-after sex hormone, and tried to prove the ovaries were the sole source of the symptoms.

He was wrong. No matter what organ he injected into the rats -- kidney, spleen, pituitary gland -- the same symptoms developed. Moreover, the rats got bleeding ulcers and enlarged or wasted organs when he did other nasty things, such as injecting them with poison, making them run hours on treadmills and leaving them on the lab roof in winter.

So Selye finally reached a different conclusion: The rats, he decided -- borrowing a term from physics -- were stressed.

Faced with any out-of-the-ordinary demand -- poison, cold, unpleasant injections or overly-rigorous workouts -- the animals’ brains signaled their bodies to haul out defenses: the stress hormones adrenaline (which boosts heart rate) and cortisol (which suppresses inflammation). Too much stress, and the body’s organs simply started to wear out.

Selye later conceded that he adopted the wrong term: technically speaking, while “stress” is a force acting on an object, “strain” is the change wrought by stress. Had he been fluent in English -- or physics -- today’s stressed-out workers would call themselves strained-out.

Selye later showed that constant stress or demands could lead to heart failure or nervous exhaustion -- a finding he extrapolated to humans.

Selye’s theories ultimately inspired scads of studies linking stress to headaches, fatigue, upset stomachs, insomnia, high blood pressure and heart disease, depression and anxiety. Stress may even be linked to cancer or ulcers.

Selye also lectured on stress, expounding on his theories of good and bad stress, overstress and even under-stress.

You could say he was a poster child for the phenomenon he chronicled: During his life, he earned three doctorates, published three dozen books and 1,500 papers, and worked 12-hour days. By his 70s, he had signs of heart failure and a failing mind.

When he died in 1982, his widow blamed the government for his death: They caused him too much stress, she said, over his financial affairs.