Stress Balls
The term "stress" had none of its current humdrum senses before the 1950s. As a semi-psychological term referring to hardship or coercion, it dated from the 14th century. It is a contour of the Medial English destresse, derived via Deficient French from Stress Balls the Latin stringere â to draw tight. It had gangling been in end in physics to refer to the civic circulating of a force exerted on a material body, resulting in strain.
But a new controlled usage developed out of Hans Seyle's details of his laboratory experiments in the 1930s. Selye started to exercise the term to refer not just to the agent but to the state of the organism as it responded and adapted to the environment. His theories of a universal non-specific stress response attracted great engrossment and contention in academic physiology and he undertook extensive research programmes and publication efforts.