A Conceptual Overview

A lthough the term stress as it relates to the human condition has been in the scientific literature since the 1930s and in the nursing literature since the late 1950s, the word did not become popular vernacular until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, the term is used in everyday vocabulary to capture a variety of human experiences that are disturbing or disruptive in some manner: “You wouldn’t believe how much stress I had today!” “I was really stressed out.” Subjective sensations commonly experienced in conjunction with “feeling stressed” are headache, shortness of breath, light-headedness or dizziness, nausea, muscle tension, fatigue, gnawing in the gut, palpitations, loss of appetite or hunger, and problems with sleep. Behavioral manifestations of stress commonly reported are crying, smoking, excessive eating, drinking alcohol, fast talking, and trembling. It is also commonplace for people to complain that stress negatively affects their functioning. It impairs their mental concentration, problem solving, decision making, and the ability to get work done in an efficient and effective manner (Barling, Kelloway, & Frone, 2004; Goleman & Gurin, 1993; Ornstein & Sobel, 1988; Pelletier, 1992, 1995; Thompson, 2010). The word stress began appearing in nursing journals in the 1950s. Stress, as a construct, was not widely recognized by nurse researchers until the 1970s (Lyon & Werner, 1987). It gained recognition as a phenomenon of interest for nursing because anecdotal data from patients and empirical evidence from researchers suggested that stress and health were inextricably related concepts. Nursing, as a discipline, was not alone in recognizing the importance that stress played in health. Other health-related disciplines had already begun to contribute to both theory development and empirical testing of the phenomenon of stress and its connection with health. Many different disciplines (e.g., psychology, social psychology, nursing, and medicine) have identified stress and coping as important variables affecting health. It has been linked to the onset of diseases, such as cardiovascular conditions (Benschop et al., 1998; Dimsdale, Ruberman, & Carleton, 1987; Ornish, 2007; Ornish, Scherwitz, & Doody, 1983; Pashkow, 1999), cancer (Cohen & Rabin, 1998; Siegel, 1986), breast cancer (Antonova & Mueller, 2008), and colds (Cohen et al., 1998; Cohen, Tyrrell, & Smith, 1991), as well as the exacerbation of symptoms such as asthma (Fitzgerald, 2009; Wright, Rodriquez, & Cohen, 1998), irritable bowel syndrome (Bennett, Tennant, Piesse, Badcock, & Kellow, 1998; Dancey, Taghavi, & Fox, 1998), ulcerative colitis (Whitehead & Schuster, 1985), arthritis (Crofford, Jacobson, & Young, 1999; Straub, Dhabhar, Bijlsma, & Cutolo, 2005), respiratory diseases (Nielson, Kristensen, Schnohr, & Gronbaeck, 2008), skin disorders (Lebwohl & 1