'The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.'
-William James

Stress –who has ever escaped its clutches? Even fetuses’ in wombs experience stress! Stress can stem from a variety of causes-relationships, job, school and daily activities-just about anything.

Stress is a demand on the physical and mental energies of an individual. It is, in effect, a response to one or more conditions.

Stress is not all bad! The condition or circumstance that causes stress may not be necessarily adverse. In fact, experts say that some stress from time to time is good. It stimulates us to do better. Some children perform better in exams and score excellent grades when they are under ‘academic’ stress; brilliant solutions to the toughest problems have arisen under the most stressful condition; spectacular works of art and literature have been produced when individuals have been emotionally stressed.

Haven’t each one of us experienced more alertness and a sharpening of senses when confronted with a dangerous situation? That’s because, our defence mechanism goes on an ‘all high’ alert. And what causes this? Our stress response - that activates the release of stress hormones into our blood stream!

It is only when extreme stress begins to affect an individual-physically or psychologically- that it becomes a cause for concern. Nevertheless, in the present time, stress has a negative connotation and is undeniably an urban malaise.

Stress through the ages

At the core of all survival lies a series of confrontation with stress and adaptations to live with it.

Homo sapiens, today, is an evolved species. Can you fathom how much stress our predecessors should have endured? Or, for that matter, the ancestors of every living thing on this earth?

'It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.'
- Charles Darwin

To survive the harshest conditions and cope with them to ensure continued survival was living with stress –one caused by ever - changing conditions. Our lives, through the portals of evolution, are a constant reminder of an innate ability to battle and overpower stress.

Stress can even induce genetic changes in living forms, especially when a species or population faces a genetic bottleneck. Evidence of such natural occurrences comes from the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Barbara McClintock’s research on 'the significance of responses of the genome to challenges”. These challenges or stress factors may be temperature changes, DNA damage, irradiation, virus or others. Genetic variations significantly alter the population giving rise to newer, evolved forms.