We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and ... More

We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and psychological understandings of stress during the twentieth century, The Age of Stress explores the relationship between scientific formulations and personal experiences of stress, on the one hand, and socio-political and cultural contexts, on the other. The book argues that scientific theories of stress and disease were strongly influenced not only by laboratory studies of homeostasis, but also by wider social, cultural and intellectual currents: the impact of economic depression during the inter-war years; modernist commitments to social reform; concerns about the consequences of military conflict during and after the Second World War; fluctuating global anxieties about political instability and the threat of terrorism during the Cold War; scientific studies of cybernetics; socio-biological accounts of behaviour; and counter-cultural arguments urging consumers to resist the incipient pressures of modern capitalism. The science of stress that emerged in this climate of anxiety was driven and shaped by, and in turn served to structure and direct, the search for individual and collective happiness in a troubled world.