STRESS MANAGEMENT: For Whom?
Emily K. Abel
In an October 2024 podcast, “A Healthy Point of View,” host Sammy Tajeda, a wellness entrepreneur, asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., how he handles stress. (The episode was reposted in March 2026.) “I meditate every day,” Kennedy answered. “And that’s important, to set your intention at the beginning of the day, to stay calm, stay peaceful. And then the best thing for me is to get in nature. I try to go hiking every day or at least a walk if I am in the city. Try to get out in the sunshine. And if I can go fishing or something in nature, that keeps me peaceful.” Asked about faith, Kennedy replied, “Relationship with God is the gravity that holds all the other parts of my life together. The battle is to keep one foot in the material world and one foot in the spiritual realm. We are biological beings but we are spiritual beings as well.”
It is unsurprising that Kennedy had his answer ready because stress management is a key feature of the wellness movement he champions. Like the movement as a whole, the emphasis on stress helps to convert systemic problems into personal ones.
The story of stress typically begins with Hans Selye, a Czech physician and biochemist who fled the Nazis in the early 1930s and found employment at McGill University a few years later. The theory he formulated in a 1936 letter to the editor of the journal Nature and then elaborated in his many later articles and books derived from his experiments with rats. He argued that organisms responded to adverse conditions in three stages, first the “Alarm Stage,” when endocrine glands released hormones that had deleterious effects on the body, then the “Resistance Stage,” when organisms successfully reversed the physiological damages that had occurred, and finally the “Exhaustion Stage,” when the organisms lacked all energy for adaptation, leaving them vulnerable to various forms of disease and even death.
After military studies demonstrated that humans as well as laboratory rats could suffer the consequences, physiologists applied the notion of stress first to members of the armed forces and then to civilians. In 1967 psychiatrists Thomas H. Holmes and Richard H. Rahe devised “The Social Readjustment Rating Scale,” based on the premise that such ordinary life events as “death of a spouse,” “divorce,” “marriage,” and “personal injury or illness” could engender difficulties analogous to those that arose from combat. The scale permitted individuals to rate their own susceptibility to stress.
“By the 1980s,” historian Elizabeth Siegel Watkins writes, “’stress’ had become an established term in the American vernacular, used to describe feelings of pressure and tension and to explain the source of some diseases.” A signal event was a June 1983 Time magazine article. The cover of the issue screamed “STRESS!” and displayed the photograph of a man’s face contorted in agony. The article highlighted the deleterious effects of stress on the body: “Stress is now known to be a major contributor, either directly, or indirectly, to coronary heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidental injuries, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide—six of the leading causes of death in the U. S.” Stress also caused serious mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety. Two-thirds of visits to family doctors were stress-related.
During the same period, Americans became familiar with the notion of burnout, a state of complete exhaustion caused by severe, chronic stress. The term is often attributed to Graham Greene whose 1960 novel, A Burnt Out Case, describes Querry, a famous architect, who arrives at a Congo leper colony after losing all sense of the meaning of life. In 1974 psychologist Herbert Freudenberger used the label to describe the experiences of workers in free clinics, women’s centers, and hot lines. Because staff members were either low-paid or volunteers, idealism and dedication were essential. “But it is precisely because we are dedicated,” he wrote, “we walk into the burn-out trap.” In 1988, Freudenberger expressed his astonishment at the speed with which the term had become part of “the daily argot of our society.” Burnout had become “a buzz word, used to convey a great number of personal and social problems.”
The growing focus on stress spawned an enormous stress management industry. As early as 1981, the Institute of Medicine called attention to the “wide range of best-selling books [that] assert that people can avoid developing hypertension, heart attacks, depression, anxiety and many other disorders by changing their lifestyles in ways that reduce stress.”
Research on family care for older people illustrates the rapidity with which the notion of stress achieved prominence. Although family members historically delivered the great bulk of care to people who were sick or disabled, the topic did not attract attention until the early 1980s. In 1990, the sociologist Leonard I. Pearlin, a key player in the field, wrote with his colleagues, “It is difficult to imagine many situations that equal—let alone surpass—the stressfulness of caregiving to relatives and friends with severe chronic impairments.” As a result, caring “acted as a magnet in attracting the interest of stress researchers.”
Numerous researchers began to devise survey instruments about events carers typically considered stressful. The first was Steven H. Zarit’s 1981 “Burden Interview,” which has been cited thousands of times and translated into other languages. According to PubMed, the government’s database for articles in the biomedical and life sciences, the number of publications with the key words “caregiver,” “stress,” “elderly” steadily grew from 2 in 1980 to 47 in 1990, to 90 in 2000, to 282 in 2010, to 479 in 2020, and to 916 in 2025. By the end of that year, a total of 8,654 articles had appeared on that subject. The great majority of advice books for carers include large sections explaining how they can handle the stress they experience.
Tajeda reminded his audience that managing stress is “not just for the elite, but for all of us.” Kennedy’s rules, however, have little relevance for most of the people whose health he now is charged with protecting. Although a popular 1974 book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart, by two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, argued that white men in high status positions experienced the highest levels of stress, we now know that stress levels are highest among workers in low-waged jobs, especially those who are members of racially marginalized groups. A spirituality practice, of course, is available to all, but most of RFK Jr.’s suggestions are useless for the population. Those who work two or more jobs to make ends meet cannot find time to meditate, exercise, or get into nature. Those who live in dangerous neighborhoods cannot take the long walks Kennedy enjoys.
An administration truly committed to reducing stress levels would enact broad-based social, political, and economic reforms. The current regime is doing just the opposite.
Sources:
Sammy Tajeda,”How Do Our Health Leaders Manage the Stress of their Job,” October 2024, reposted March 2026,
Emily K. Abel, Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).