Eric Wargo on stress

The following excellent artcle on stress by Eric Wargo seems to have appeared in part in several places(including The Hindu), often without acknowledgement. Conclusion:
" So Nietzsche’s strenuous view of life, “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” just plain isn’t true. Stressors that don’t kill you in the short run may yet shorten your life or drastically lessen its quality.

But quit your moping and look on the bright side: The newly refined science of stress could lead to new drug therapies that can control stress or inhibit its effects on health. Also, depression and anxiety are not only results of stress, but also causes, and existing therapeutic and medical treatments for these conditions can help change how people perceive threats, put their life challenges in context, and cut stressors down to manageable size. The cycle doesn’t have to be vicious, in other words.
What’s more, the confirmation that the mind directly affects the body can work as much in our favor as it does to our detriment, as the personality-and-stress research above indicates. As APS Fellow Carol Dweck, Stanford University, has argued, personality is mutable (see Herbert, 2007); if our outlooks and beliefs about ourselves can be changed, so (theoretically) can our vulnerability to life’s slings and arrows.

The bottom line: Stress is not inevitable. Even with more than one’s fair share of vulnerability genes, there’s plenty of room to take one’s life and one’s mind in a less stressful direction. Relaxation techniques such as meditation and yoga, for example, have been confirmed to quell stress demons. Even if you are a determined workaholic glued to your cell phone or a fearful and angry urban neurotic like Woody Allen, stress-reduction methods are readily available to cope with stress in the short term and even alter perceptions of stressors in the long term.

Meyer Friedman, co-discoverer of the link between “Type A” behavior and heart disease, is a case in point. A self-described Type-A personality, Friedman wound up suffering a heart-attack at age 55. He made the conscious choice to change his ways in accordance with his own discoveries — including following his own prescription by reading the classics. To get more in touch with his slow, patient, and creative side, he read Proust’s languid seven-volume opus Remembrance of Things Past three times. In short, he trained himself to relax and enjoy life, and he had the last laugh at stress by living to the ripe old age of 90. "
Eric Wargo is the Managing Editor of "Psychological Science in the Public Interest", and has written popular pieces on Daniel Gilbert, Philip Zimbardo and others.