Healthy Stress Newsletter

A New Way to Define Stress

In my college textbook, Coping with Stress in a Changing World (2007), I define stress as "a holistic transaction between an individual and a potential stressor resulting in a stress response."

The three key components of this definition (holistic, transaction, potential stressor, and stress response) are drawn from the fields of health, psychology, and physiology respectively. Each field represents a rich historical tradition of theory and practice that's contributed to the most current understanding of stress and how to manage it

A holistic transaction combines elements of holistic health and a transactional view of stress. The term holistic comes from holistic health, a multifaceted way of viewing health that combines your physical, social, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, environmental, and occupational wellbeing.

A transactional view of stress comes primarily from the work of psychologists Richard S. Lazarus and Suzanne Folkman (1984) . A stress transaction is assessment that goes on in your mind regarding how you view a potential stressor and your ability to cope with it once you're exposed to it. Once you're exposed to a potential stressor, your mind assesses two things: (1) whether the potential stressor is threatening to you, and (2) your ability to cope with it. If you feel threatened by and unable to cope with the potential stressor it transforms into an actual stressor.

Stress transactions do not occur in a vacuum. They are influenced by your overall level of health and wellness at the moment of exposure to a potential stressor. This is why I call it a holistic transaction.

A potential stressor is something, someone, or some situation that has the ability to threaten you. It's crucial that you realize that a stressor is really only a potential stressor until you feel threatened by it and unable to cope with it.

A stress response is a chain reaction of physiological events that occur in your body once you feel threatened by and unable to cope with a potential stressor. Once this happens, your brain sends messages throughout your body via nerve transmissions and hormones that switch on a complex response designed to mobilize energy to help you fight or flee from the stressor.

Defining stress as a holistic transaction between an individual and a potential stressor resulting in a stress response is an entirely new way of looking at stress. When you start to view stress this way, you'll no longer see it as something that just happens to you, and is beyond your ability to manage. Instead you'll begin to view your stress as something that has a lot to do with the messages you tell yourself about potential stressors and your ability to cope with them.