Shipman's software books: Selye's work on stress

Selye, Hans. The stress of life. McGraw-Hill. Revised edition, March 1978. ISBN 0070562121.

Selye, Hans. Stress without distress Signet, December 1975, ISBN 0451161920.

Critical lessons from these books:

• Organisms seem to act as if they had a kind of fuel called adaptation energy that is consumed by adapting to change. Relatively static situations have low stress; rapid change is stressful.
• There is a limit to how long an organism can sustain ``hard burn'' situations, where they consume this energy at a high rate. This limit seems to be innate, but variable across organisms.
• This short-term supply of energy is replenished, but slowly.
• There is a limit on how much total adaptation energy an organism can burn. This seems to determine its lifespan, given a particular pattern of stress. It too is innate but individually variable.
• Each organism has a preferred level at which it likes to burn the energy. Too little stress is as unhealthy as too much.

These of course are vast oversimplifications, and perhaps inaccurate. But I believe Selye's books are vital for those who must cope with their limitations.

Last updated: 1999/05/09 18:35:05
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/selye.html