Stress is often described as a biological response, but historically, it is a relatively recent concept. For most of human existence, people experienced danger, grief, hunger, and uncertainty, yet they did not describe themselves as “stressed.” They suffered, endured, feared, prayed, fought, and recovered. The nervous system moved through cycles of activation and completion.
The word itself comes from the Latin stringere (to tighten). It entered English through engineering in the 17th and 18th centuries, referring to the load placed on physical structures. Only in the twentieth century did the term migrate into physiology, largely through the work of Hans Selye, who described stress as the body’s non-specific response to demand. The organism, he observed, reacts similarly to many different pressures: activation, mobilisation, and, if prolonged, exhaustion.
This was a crucial shift. Stress was no longer an external event but an internal condition.
Yet the modern experience of stress cannot be understood purely in biological terms. It is inseparable from changes in the structure of human life. In pre-industrial environments, activation was usually followed by resolution. A threat appeared, the body mobilised, and the situation concluded through escape, confrontation, or rest. The nervous system completed its arc.
Industrialisation altered this pattern. Human beings became embedded in abstract systems governed by clocks, schedules, and symbolic obligations. One could be mobilised without the possibility of completion. The threat was no longer a predator but an unfinished task, a delayed response, a social evaluation, a letter unanswered. The body entered readiness, but action was deferred indefinitely.
Stress, in this sense, is incomplete mobilisation.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this condition intensified. Digital environments introduced continuous anticipatory load. The nervous system learned to expect interruption at any moment: messages, notifications, demands for attention. Activation became decoupled from meaningful resolution. The organism remained in preparation without closure.
This has consequences: cognitive bandwidth narrows. The organism becomes oriented toward monitoring rather than acting. Instead of moving outward into the world, energy circulates internally, often experienced as tension, rumination, or fatigue.
From a neuropsychological perspective, stress reflects a disruption in the coordination between intention, perception, and action. When intention cannot be enacted, it does not disappear. It persists as a latent activation within the nervous system. Over time, this produces the subjective experience of pressure without direction.
Stress, therefore, is not simply the presence of demand. It is the persistence of an uncompleted action.
Psychological recovery does not occur solely through rest, but through restoring continuity by allowing perception, intention, and action to re-align. When action becomes possible again, even in small forms, the nervous system recognises completion. Tension resolves not because the world becomes simpler, but because the organism regains its capacity to move within it.
In this sense, stress is both a biological signal and a historical phenomenon. It reflects not only the limits of the body, but the structure of the environments we inhabit.
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