One of the people I’ve become interested in while writing Rest (331 days to go!) is Hans Selye, the Viennese-born scientist who is one of the inventors of the modern idea of stress.

I discovered Selye completely by chance this summer, when I stumbled on a copy of one of his books in a used bookstore in Willits, a small town in northern California (that has two shockingly good bookstores).

Selye did some of the pioneering research (building on the work of Walter Cannon and others) on the body’s reaction to stresses, and argued that many diseases were a response to (or were exacerbated by) stress. At the time this was a controversial notion, but it seems commonplace now.

Over time, Selye realized that stress was not an entirely bad thing; while he didn’t disavow the idea that stress could be a killer, he had evolved to a more balanced position about “stressors,” as he came to call them. Stress was unavoidable; the challenge was to learn how to benefit from it. As he wrote in 1973,

Complete freedom from stress is death. Contrary to public opinion, we must not— and indeed cannot— avoid stress, but we can meet it efficiently and enjoy it by learning more about its mechanism and adjusting our philosophy of life accordingly.

Now, I’m reading some of his work and figuring out how to use his story to introduce some bigger issues about the role of stress in modern life– e.g., how it’s become a badge of honor to say how stressed and overworked you are, how we think of it as a disease of the successful, etc..

I’m also hoping to learn something about how he dealt with stresses himself, and how he worked and rested. Selye was one of the most prolific scientists I’ve ever studied– he wrote more than 1500 articles, and many books– and it would be nice to be able to talk about both the concept of stress, and the work and rest of the person who did so much to advance it. Did “earning more about its mechanism” allow Selye to adjust his “philosophy of life accordingly?” One hopes that the answer is yes.

[Quote from Hans Selye, “The Evolution of the Stress Concept,” American Scientist, Vol. 61, No. 6 (November-December 1973), pp. 692-699, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27844072.