The History of Stress Management Part 2: Hans Selye and the Birth of Stress Science
The History of Stress Management
Part 2: Hans Selye and the Birth of Stress Science
By James Porter
If Part 1 of this series revealed how trauma was misunderstood and stigmatized in war, Part 2 brings us to the moment when stress itself was finally named, studied, and legitimized—largely due to the work of one extraordinary researcher: Dr. Hans Selye.
Hans Selye: The Father of Stress Research
In the 1930s, long before stress was a household word, Hans Selye was a young medical student in Montreal making an unexpected observation. No matter what illness his lab rats had—whether it was cold exposure, infection, or injury—they all responded in a similar way. Their adrenal glands enlarged. Their thymus shrank. Their bodies went through predictable changes, regardless of the trigger.
Selye came to believe that this pattern wasn’t just a response to disease—it was the body’s universal response to demand. And so, in 1936, he published a short paper in Nature introducing the world to what he called the General Adaptation Syndrome, a three-stage process the body goes through under prolonged stress: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
With this model, Selye laid the scientific foundation for understanding stress as a biological process, not just a psychological or emotional one. It was a revolutionary idea.
1700 Papers, 3 Nobel Nominations—and a Naming Regret
Over his prolific career, Selye published more than 1,700 papers and 30 books. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. His work transformed our understanding of how chronic stress can lead to everything from heart disease to burnout to premature aging.
But despite his immense impact, Selye had one major regret: the word “stress” itself. Borrowed from physics, the term originally referred to external forces acting on a material. Selye later admitted that a better word for what he was describing would have been strain—the internal response to those forces. He often noted that the confusion between external stressors and internal stress responses muddled his message, and to this day, the terminology remains a little blurry.
The Mind-Body Connection Gets Serious
Selye’s work also helped revive interest in the mind-body connection, which had largely been dismissed by early 20th-century medicine. His research showed that persistent emotional stress—like frustration, fear, or anxiety—could lead to measurable physical effects. In doing so, he paved the way for future research into psychosomatic medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, and the whole field of stress management.
By the 1950s and '60s, his findings had entered the public conversation. Stress was no longer seen as just a military or psychiatric concern. It was something everyday people experienced at work, at home, and in modern life.
Stress Enters the Workplace
It wasn’t long before corporations began paying attention. If stress could wear down a lab rat, what was it doing to their managers, executives, and line workers?
This realization sets the stage for Part 3 of our series, where we’ll look at how businesses, particularly IBM, began investing in stress management and workplace wellness—not just because it was humane, but because it made economic sense.
But make no mistake: none of this progress would have been possible without Hans Selye. He didn’t just identify a medical condition; he gave us a language for talking about it, a framework for understanding it, and the scientific legitimacy to study it.
Stress, as we now understand it, is one of the defining health challenges of modern life—and Selye saw it coming almost a century ago.
Erica Tuminski
Author