From Action and Contemplation to Stress and Relaxation

The phenomenon of stress among young people is not new, but it appears to be ratcheting up — as is the attention given to it. In our region of northern California, a recent cluster of high school suicides has prompted a new level of urgency, and a determination to understand teenagers' less visible but more pervasive forms of desperation. Parents and schools are beginning to reexamine their approaches, scaling back homework and extracurricular activities and encouraging teens to practice mindfulness meditation and yoga as stress relievers. These responses, however positive, reflect a widely held assumption that stress is a consequence of overscheduling and increased pressure: reduce the pressure and unpack the schedule, it holds, and stress will dissipate. But where this assumption takes the problem to be one of excess — too much homework, pressure, scheduling, distraction — others perceive a larger problem of absence. "The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress," observes William Damon, professor of education at Stanford. "It's meaninglessness." As Damon argues in his 2008 book The Path to Purpose, we could expect more young people to thrive "if, during the early years of strenuous effort and high achievement, they had found purposes that went deeper than the grades and awards" expected of them. Purposelessness, like stress, he points out, is not confined to the affluent — those most likely to overschedule their children with expensive activities and to buy books that tell them not to — but afflicts all income levels. And, like stress, it requires a remedy more intensive than relaxation.

Damon's diagnosis of meaninglessness actually returns to the earliest definitions of "stress." Although it feels like an inescapable feature of our age, the term only entered the popular vocabulary in 1983, when a Time magazine cover story declared "a stress epidemic." Detailing "how heavy a toll stress is taking on the nation's well being," it found stress to be responsible for two-thirds of doctor visits in the United States, six of the country's leading causes of death, and untold costs in lost productivity. Hans Selye had first drawn attention to the phenomenon of "stress" in the 1950s, borrowing from engineering the term for pressure on an object from an external force. An endocrinologist, Selye analyzed in detail the physical manifestations of stress in the body and advised relaxation as an antidote: "If we are just doing too much," he observed, "the great remedy here is to learn to relax as quickly and completely as possible."

Yet even Selye was convinced that the incapacitating stress he observed in his research subjects and all around him had its origins and ultimate remedy in the philosophical rather than the physical realm: the ultimate protection against stress, he concluded, is "a satisfactory philosophy of life." In Stress without Distress, a popular self-help book that he published long after his research made him famous, Selye elaborated the connection between philosophical and physical health. To remain healthy, he observed, "man must have some goal, some purpose in life that he can respect and be proud to work for." He noted that his medical research provided such a purpose — and a remedy to stress in his own life: "The capacity to contemplate the harmonious elegance of Nature, at least with some degree of understanding, is one of the most satisfactory experiences of which man is capable. ... There is an equanimity and a peace of mind which can be achieved only through contact with the sublime."

If Selye is the father of modern stress research, the father of modern relaxation research is Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, who built on Selye's insights into the physiology of stress. His popular 1975 book, The Relaxation Response, recommends the regular practice of deliberate relaxation as "a built-in method of counteracting the stresses of everyday living." Where stress is the by-product of activity, relaxation, according to Benson, involves "the adoption of a passive attitude, which is perhaps the most important of the elements" of its practice. Describing the ancient roots of such relaxation practices in meditation and prayer, he acknowledges that they "may connote exotic Eastern cults or Christian monks who spend most of their waking hours in monastery cells contemplating God." Yet, he insists, even such religious practices hold relevance for modern secular life, a point he makes by citing William James: "To find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process."

Much as Selye identifies stress with philosophical failure, Benson identifies relaxation with the healing of psychic, and not merely physiological, wounds: in this, both medical authorities suggest that the work of "reaching unity" and "peace of mind" will ultimately come not from medicine but from a more profound source. Strikingly, the very works that popularized the contemporary sense of "stress" and "relaxation" insist that those terms are inadequate to diagnosing and treating the root problems of the phenomena they describe. Stress, in Selye's account, results not simply from action or overaction but from action unmotivated by a driving purpose. And the need for relaxation, in Benson's view, comes not merely from modern pressures but from a troubling disunity or disharmony at modern humanity's core.

As Selye's and Benson's work has been absorbed into the cultural mainstream, the terms "stress" and "relaxation" have been isolated and treated as purely physiological phenomena; missing are the philosophical disorders that Selye and Benson diagnosed at their base. But without those philosophical underpinnings, stress and relaxation devolve to the therapeutic. They also detach from history, encouraging us to imagine that our contemporary experience is unprecedented. It isn't, of course. But in the absence of historical context or philosophical depth, it resists analysis — and ultimately, understanding.

As used today, "stress" and "relaxation" represent the poor successors to an older and richer pair of terms that can lead us a fuller and deeper understanding of our contemporary struggle. That pair is "action" and "contemplation." Their long and dynamic history embraces meanings that would be at home in our present age — describing, at various times, a life marked by frenetic obligation versus one of deeply centered calm — but it also restores philosophical depth to experiences that we perceive to be historically isolated and isolating. When Benson appeals to the need to "[remedy] inner incompleteness and [reduce] inner discord," he describes a disorder that runs deeper than overscheduling. And when Selye commends "the capacity to contemplate the...