Traffic jams may stress you more than getting married
Weddings, divorces and house moves feel like the big stressors, but because they are rare, researchers find they matter less than the small stuff. Daily hassles such as deadlines, traffic and irritating colleagues strike most often and so carry the heaviest physiological load. How intensely you rate them may even track with mortality.
Psychologists define stress as a feeling of emotional strain and pressure. A little of it helps, sharpening motivation, reactions and athletic performance; too much raises the risk of strokes, heart attacks, ulcers and depression and worsens existing illness. The endocrinologist Hans Selye called stress the common result of any demand on the body, mental or physical, and insisted that a stressor is neutral in itself. The same event can energise one person and overwhelm another.
Selye's 1974 scheme crossed two axes. Good stress, eustress, from the Greek eu for good, arises when a challenge is seen as positive; distress, from the Latin dis, occurs when demands far outstrip ability and quality of life suffers. The other axis runs from hyperstress to hypostress, too much versus too little. His ideal was to balance those two while maximising eustress.
Researchers usually sort stressors into four groups: catastrophes such as floods, earthquakes and pandemics; major life events; daily hassles; and ambient background stressors. The psychologist Holger Ursin argued in 1988 that they share a core feature, a gap between what a person expects and what they perceive that cannot be resolved. Stressors do most harm when chronic, highly disruptive or felt to be uncontrollable. Timing matters too: events within the past month are generally not linked to illness, while chronic problems stretching back months are. University freshmen are about twice as likely to be stressed as final-year students.
Perception is the lever. Carolyn Aldwin's long-term study of older men at Oregon State University, with an average starting age around 66, found that those who rated their hassles as very intense had markedly higher mortality. Choices themselves can cause strain, whether between two appealing options or two bad ones. A 2025 review found that in 25 of 29 clinical studies, psychological stress increased electrical activity in the jaw muscles used for chewing.
Source: Psychological stress
