What Is Stress?
Most people would say they know what stress is. But for scientists who study stress, it has been surprisingly hard to define. This is because there are so many ways of looking at stress.
Some researchers have studied how our bodies react to stress. You know how your heart beats faster, you perspire more heavily, and your words do not come out right when you are placed in a stressful situation. But knowing how we feel when we experience stress does not explain it; nor does it tell us what causes it.
Other scientists have looked at stressors: events or situations that produce stress. A deadline, a poor test performance, or bothersome noises all may be thought of as stressors. Even pleasant events can be stressors. Planning a party or starting a new job can be just as stressful as being called to the principal's office.
Stress, then, can be caused by both negative and positive events, or stressors. Of course, whether an event is thought of as positive or negative is, in some ways, a matter of personal choice.
In sum, it is the way people interpret an event that makes it stressful or not stressful. This process of interpretation is called appraisal. Depending on how people appraise, or judge, circumstances, they may or may not consider them stressful.
What, specifically, causes people to appraise a situation as stressful? The answer depends on how much of a threat or challenge it appears to be. Circumstances that bring a threat or challenge to a person's sense of well-being produce stress. Those that do not threaten or challenge us are not stressful.
Looking at stress this way gives us a general definition of the concept of stress: Stress is a response to circumstances that seem threatening or challenging.
The circumstances that cause stress vary from one person to another. It all depends on how we appraise circumstances. In addition, the things that cause us stress today may not cause us stress at another time. And the opposite is true: things that once caused no stress may now be stressful.