Stress without Distress

HANS SELYE

Stress is "the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it,"
that is, the rate at which we live at anyone moment. All living beings are
constantly under stress and anything, pleasant or unpleasant, that speeds up the
intensity of life, causes a temporary increase in stress, the wear and tear exerted
upon the body. A painful blow and a passionate kiss can be equally stressful.
The financier worrying about the stock exchange, the laborer or the baseball
player straining his every muscle to the limit, the journalist trying to meet a
deadline, the patient fighting a fever, all are under stress. But so is the baseball
fan who merely watches an interesting game, and the gambler who suddenly
realizes that he has lost his last cent or that he has won a million dollars.
Contrary to widespread belief, stress is not simply nervous tension nor the
result of damage. Above all, stress is not something to be necessarily avoided. It
is associated with the expression of all our innate drives. Stress ensues as long as
a demand is made on any part of the body. Indeed, complete freedom from
stress is death!

THE SYNDROME OF "JUST BEING SICK"

It was in 1925 that I first suspected the existence of what I later called stress
and the General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.). When studying medicine at the
University of Prague, during one of the initial lectures in internal medicine, we

HANS SEL YE • Institut de mMecine et de chirurgie experimentales, Universite de Mon-

treal, Quebec, Canada.

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G. Serban (ed.), Psychopathology of Human Adaptation

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1976
138 HansSelye

were shown several patients in the earliest stages of various infectious diseases.
The professor carefully pointed out all the specific signs and symptoms charac-
teristic of each disease but what struck me most was that each of these patients
felt and looked ill, had a coated tongue, and complained of more or less diffuse
aches and pains in the joints and of intestinal disturbances with loss of appetite
and loss of weight. The patients we had just seen also had a common syndrome,
but the professor attached very little significance to the signs that were common
to all these diseases because they were "nonspecific" and hence "of no use" to
the physician in making a correct diagnosis or prescribing the appropriate
treatment.
Instead of concentrating exclusively on specific manifestations of disease,
would it not be even more important to learn something about the mechanism
of being sick and the means of treating this "general syndrome of sickness"
which appeared to me as being superimposed upon all individual diseases? I
could not understand why our professor did not pay any attention to it.
However, as a student, I accepted the fact that "this is so," just as physicians had
done ever since the dawn of medical history.
Not until ten years later did these same questions confront me again. At that
time I was working in the biochemistry department of McGill University in
Montreal, trying to find a new ovarian hormone in extracts of cattle ovaries. All
the extracts, no matter how prepared, produced the same syndrome character-
ized by (1) enlargement of the adrenal cortex, (2) gastrointestinal ulcers, and
(3) involution of the thymus and lymph nodes. Although at first I ascribed all
these changes to some new ovarian hormone in my extract, it soon became
apparent that extracts of other organs-in fact, toxic substances of all kinds-
produced the same changes. It was only then that I suddenly remembered my
classroom impreSSion of the "syndrome of just being sick." In a flash, I realized
that what I had produced with my impure extracts and toxic drugs was an
experimental replica of this condition.
This simple hunch of a connection between the almost forgotten, purely
speculative, clinical concept of student days and the reproducible, objectively
measurable changes in the animal experiments at hand was the basis for the
development of the entire stress concept.

TRIPHASIC RESPONSE

During this reaction, all the organs of the body showed involutional or
degenerative changes; only the adrenal cortex actually seemed to flourish on
stress. I suspected this adrenal response to play a useful part in a nonspecific
adaptive reaction, which I visualized as a "call to arms" of the body's defense
forces and therefore designated as the "alarm reaction."