In popular discourse, people use the word “stress” to mean several different things.  “Stress” refers the factors which impose upon us.  “I’m under a lot of stress at work.”  “This is a stressful time in my life.”  It refers to one’s experience of those factors.  “I’m stressed out.”  “My stress level is high right now.”  And it refers to the physiological and psychological effects of that experience.  “I’m having stress symptoms.”  “I’m having post-traumatic stress.”

There is no agreement on the correct way to use the word, so we will establish some definitions just between us:  Duress is that environmental influence which causes stress in the subject.  A physical or social threat, such as a violent attack or a lot of pressure at work, constitutes duress.  Stress is the subject’s physiological reaction to duress.  Elevated heart rates and hormonal responses, sweat, worry, a mind constantly thinking about the things that could go wrong.  A stress disorder is when the subject experiences stress effects which inhibit rather than promote survival.

Notice that I do not say a stress disorder is the experience of stress in the absence of a valid duress stimulus.  Consider the soldier who comes home from Iraq.  After patrolling along the streets there, where IEDs were routinely hidden in street-side piles of trash, he returns to the U. S. and finds it impossible to walk or drive down a street where piles of trash have been placed out for collection.  The aversion in him is too strong.  This man is frequently regarded as having PTSD.  He is told that he has PTSD, and he comes to believe he has PTSD.  Everyone works together to convince him that, because he has a strong stress reaction to this specious stimulus, he has a stress disorder.

This could not be farther from the truth.  The truth is that he is perfectly healthy.  He has a healthy and properly functioning survival heuristic which just happens not to be applicable to that particular situation.  If you spent your life being hunted by bears and having to fight them for your survival, then encountering at close quarters a tame bear in a circus or zoo would cause you tremendous stress as well.  This would not be a disorder in you; you are perfectly healthy and functioning properly.  Proper function is not always applicable function.  The systems in question, your heuristic survival mechanisms, are not designed to distinguish abstract differences between superficially similar stimuli; quite the opposite.  They are designed from the ground up to process superficially similar stimuli quickly and unquestioningly, and never to bog down in abstraction, so that they can keep you alive.

This soldier only has a stress disorder when his stress reactions begin to inhibit his survival, and generally that only happens when the people around him convince him that he is sick and he as a result begins to implode, obsessing over his “malfunctioning” stress reactions, condemning himself for them, feeling tortured by them. The corrective for this is not to try to eliminate healthy neurological function, but simply to continue refining the heuristic. Train the mind to recognize the difference between a bear in captivity and a bear in the wild. Between trash piles in Iraq and trash cans in Tennessee.

So trained, what becomes of the soldier? How does he compare to the average citizen who has never exposed himself to such duress? Overall, the soldier is the healthier of the two, the happier, and, yes, the lesser stressed. Some warfighters do end up wired to respond with protective alarm to certain stimuli, but far more universal and far more importantly, warfighters and others who subject themselves to duress are far less triggered by trivial duress. The common challenges of life do not stress them. Consider the military veteran attending law school, exempli gratia my own sister: in a lecture hall of 60 or more first-year law students, most of whom are sweating, breaking down in tears, drinking, taking drugs, vomiting from sheer stress, she alone is calm, cheerful, even laughing, finding humor in the material. To her, the workload, the pressure of competition, the pressure of judgement, and the risks to one’s future are nothing new, and indeed of little comparison to those minutes behind a machinegun on the Persian Gulf, waiting for the Iranians to make the first move, or interdicting a smuggler’s fast-boat.

This you cannot escape: as, if you want to be healthier you must be stronger, and to be stronger you must endure injury, so to be less stressed you must have a higher tolerance for duress, and to acquire a higher tolerance for duress, you must endure it. You must seek out painful, stressful, scary situations. You must seek out real danger, and real suffering, in order to be happy.

Perfectly safe people, for whom everything is provided and who are protected from everything, don’t have a less fulfilling life, but they literally die of mental and physical decay. It destroys them. If you wonder what that looks like, look around yourself.  Look at the prevalence of anxiety disorders, the rage, and the violence amongst the safest and most privileged classes of your society.