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Concern over the "stress epidemic" has prompted what may be called a mass fight-and-flight reaction. New fields have sprung into being: behavioral medicine, to battle stress-related illness; psychoneuroimmunology, to explore the way emotional states affect the body's defenses. Major corporations have established elaborate stress-management programs to help harried executives cope. And around the country, but especially in mellow-minded California, says Psychiatrist Mardi Horowitz of the University of California at San Francisco, "everyone is massaging, jogging and hot-tubbing to reduce this cumulative stress."
No one really knows if there is more stress now than in the past, but many experts believe it has become more pervasive. "We live in a world of uncertainties," says Harvard's Benson, "everything from the nuclear threat to job insecurity to the near assassination of the President to the lacing of medicines with poisons." Through television, these problems loom up under our very noses, and yet, says Psychologist Kenneth Dychtwald of Berkeley, Calif., the proximity only frustrates us: "We can't fight back with those people on TV."
The upheaval in society's most basic values adds greatly to the general level of anxiety. Even our pleasures are often fretful. When Psychiatrist George Serban of New York University conducted a nationwide poll of 1,008 mostly married men and women aged 18 to 60, he found that their greatest source of stress was the changes in society's attitudes toward sex, including sexual permissiveness and "the new social roles of the sexes." While stress might have once taken the form of an occasional calamity, it is now "a chronic, relentless psychosocial situation," says Dr. Paul Rosch, director of the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, N.Y.
Curiously, Rosch notes, today's pressures have created a breed of thrill seekers who, often to their own detriment, prefer excitement over tranquillity. Life in the fast lane becomes a dangerous habit for them. "Skydivers get hooked on the jump," he says, "executives purposely arrive at the airport at the last possible minute. People today have become addicted to their own adrenaline secretion."
For all its present vogue, "stress" has only recently been admitted into the medical vocabulary. For years, doctors considered the term too unscientific to be taken seriously. "The moment you used the word, you were dismissed as a thinking individual," says Dr. Harold Ward, director of the stress medicine laboratory at the University of California at San Diego. One reason was the lack of an adequate definition for the concept. According to the late Dr. Hans Selye, the Austrian-born founding father of stress research, stress is simply "the rate of wear and tear in the body." But others persist in using the term to refer