120 Fun Facts About Stress

When Hans Selye's injected lab animals all fell ill in the same way, what did he first believe he had discovered?

A new hormone. Then every irritant he tried, from cold to plain injury, left the animals with the same damage, stomach ulcers included, and he saw that the cause was the ordeal itself: stress.

Stanford's Robert Sapolsky spent decades studying stress in which wild animals in Kenya?

Baboons. He called them the perfect subjects: they live in big, complex troops and have hours of daylight to spare, which, he wrote, they devote to being rotten to each other.

A polygraph looks for lies in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and which other sign of stress?

Sweating, read as a change in the skin's electrical conductance. Fear or plain nerves can raise all four signals in a truthful person, so a US National Academies review found little basis for expecting the polygraph to be highly accurate.

In the general adaptation syndrome, what final stage follows the alarm and resistance phases?

Exhaustion. If the stressor never lets up, the body's reserves for resisting it finally run out, and it falls victim to the very thing it has been holding off.

Which term did Hans Selye popularise for positive, beneficial stress?

Eustress joins the Greek eu-, good, to stress, by contrast with distress. Selye argued the body answers a happy demand and a harmful one in the same way; later studies have found differences.

Which 1956 bestseller by Hans Selye brought his general adaptation syndrome ideas to the public?

The Stress of Life took an idea worked out in the laboratory to general readers, and within a decade or so psychologists had adopted the word. He followed it in 1974 with Stress Without Distress.

Which Harvard physiologist coined 'fight or flight' and wrote The Wisdom of the Body (1932)?

Walter Cannon also took on William James's famous claim that we feel sorry because we cry: his experiments suggested that the feeling and the bodily upheaval arrive together, the Cannon-Bard theory.

Which newly discovered technology let the discoverer of fight-or-flight watch fear stop a cat's stomach from churning?

X-rays. On the screen a nursing cat's stomach fell still the moment she grew anxious, and the waves began again only once she had been petted until she purred.

During the fight-or-flight response, which organ pours stored glucose into the blood for a burst of energy?

The liver keeps a reserve of glucose packed away as glycogen, and the hormone surge of an emergency unlocks it within moments, which is one reason a bad fright sends blood sugar climbing.

What happens to the pupils during the fight-or-flight response?

They dilate, letting in more light so that sight sharpens along with the other senses. A frightened cat shows the same surge: wide pupils, a racing heart and fur standing on end.

Popular extensions of "fight or flight" add which two further F responses?

Freeze and fawn: the therapist Pete Walker named the fawn response after treating adults abused as children, who had learned that pleasing a threatening parent was safer than protesting.

Which branch of the autonomic nervous system drives the fight-or-flight response?

Sympathetic: its nerves also tug the tiny muscle at the base of each hair, which is why a sudden fright raises goosebumps.

The parasympathetic nervous system is often summarised by which four-word phrase?

The cheekier version is "feed and breed". It slows the heart and gets digestion moving again once the threat has passed.

Which childhood pastime became a stress-relief craze for adults in 2015?

Colouring books: in 2011 a publisher asked the illustrator Johanna Basford for a children's one, she talked them into a book for grown-ups instead, and her Secret Garden went on to sell millions.

Cortisol raises blood sugar and, when it stays high, has what effect on the immune system?

Suppresses it: cortisol blocks the release of the substances that cause inflammation, which is why the steroid medicines that calm asthma, eczema and arthritis are built to mimic it.

In a healthy person, cortisol levels are naturally highest at what time?

Early morning: cortisol peaks around the time of waking and is much lower by late afternoon, which is why doctors schedule cortisol blood tests for the morning.

Which pituitary hormone signals the adrenal glands to make cortisol?

ACTH, short for adrenocorticotropic hormone: doctors inject a man-made version and measure the cortisol that follows, to check that the adrenal glands still answer the signal.

Chronically excessive cortisol produces which named condition?

Cushing's syndrome is most often caused not by stress but by long courses of cortisol-like steroid medicines, taken for conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Blood pressure that reads high only at the doctor's office, from sheer nerves, is named after what?

The white coat: "white coat hypertension" is blamed on the anxiety of the visit, so doctors confirm it with a monitor that takes readings at home, where the numbers come out normal.

Where in the body are the adrenal glands located?

Above the kidneys, which is how they got their name: adrenal joins the Latin ad, "near", and renes, "kidneys". The right gland is pyramid-shaped and the left a crescent.

Which duo released the hit single "Stressed Out" in 2015?

Twenty One Pilots: when the song won them a Grammy in 2017, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun dropped their trousers and collected it in their underwear, keeping a promise they had made to each other years earlier.

Cortisone was first identified by Edward Kendall and Harold Mason at which US institution?

The Mayo Clinic: its arthritis specialist Philip Hench had seen patients' pain ease during jaundice or pregnancy, suspected a steroid, and in 1948 tried Kendall's compound on rheumatoid arthritis with striking results.

On the 1967 Holmes and Rahe stress scale, which life event scores the maximum 100 points?

Death of a spouse scores 100, against 73 for divorce. Add up more than 300 points in a single year and the scale rates you at serious risk of illness.

On the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, which happy event outscores being fired?

Marriage scores 50 life-change units to 47 for being fired, because the scale rates how much readjustment an event demands, welcome or not.

Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe built their 1967 stress scale from records of 5,000 what?

Medical patients: the pair wanted to know whether a pile-up of life events came before illness. Rahe then gave the scale to 2,500 American sailors, whose scores did track who fell ill over the next six months.

The Yerkes-Dodson law, published in 1908, describes the relationship between performance and what?

Arousal: performance climbs with pressure only up to a point and then falls away, an inverted U first seen in "dancing mice" learning which of two boxes gave an electric shock.

Herbert Freudenberger's 1974 paper "Staff Burn-Out" was about which worn-out group?

Free-clinic volunteers, himself among them: after 12-hour days in his own practice the psychologist worked until 2 a.m. at a New York clinic for drug addicts, and wore out along with the rest of its staff.

How does the WHO's ICD-11 classify burnout?

An occupational phenomenon: the WHO defines burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and says the word should not be used for other areas of life.

Besides reduced accomplishment and feeling emotionally drained, what is the Maslach Burnout Inventory's third dimension?

Depersonalization: an unfeeling, impersonal response to the people a worker is meant to help. The version of the test for other jobs calls it cynicism, a way of keeping a draining job at a distance.

The Japanese word karoshi translates as what?

Overwork death: Japan officially rules deaths as karoshi, and after a 24-year-old at the ad agency Dentsu died in 2015, having logged over 100 hours of overtime a month, the company's president resigned.

In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn opened a hospital stress clinic whose eight-week course teaches which practice?

Mindfulness: he took the meditation he had learned from Zen Buddhist teachers, stripped out the religion and taught it at what is now UMass Memorial, and hundreds of thousands of people have since taken the course.

Stress and anxiety are common triggers for bruxism, which is the habit of doing what?

Grinding your teeth: it often happens during sleep, so many people first hear of it from a dentist who spots the wear, and the usual answer is a custom mouth guard worn at night to protect the teeth.

The Whitehall studies of stress and health followed which group of workers?

British civil servants: men in the lowest grades, such as messengers and doorkeepers, died at three times the rate of the top administrators, and smoking and other known risks explained only part of the gap.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, triggered by intense emotional stress, is better known by what name?

Broken heart syndrome: it mimics a heart attack even though the coronary arteries are clear, and most people recover with no lasting damage. About nine in ten patients are women, most of them past the menopause.

The stress-induced heart condition takotsubo is named after a Japanese pot used to catch what?

Octopuses: on an X-ray the stunned left ventricle balloons out at its tip as it contracts, and the Japanese doctors who first described the condition thought it looked like a fisherman's tako-tsubo.

PTSD became an official diagnosis after research on veterans returning from which war?

Vietnam War: research on its returning veterans, along with Holocaust survivors and victims of sexual trauma, led the American Psychiatric Association to add PTSD to its diagnostic manual, DSM-III, in 1980.

Army psychologist Charles Myers's 1915 paper on "shell shock" ran in which medical journal?

The Lancet: the name blamed blasts from artillery shells, but so many men with the same symptoms had been nowhere near one that doctors came to see the injury as emotional, not physical.

In 1917 what did the British Army do about the diagnosis "shell shock"?

Banned it entirely: the Army had come to see the label as a convenient way for men to avoid their duties, and doctors near the front marked such cases "Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous" instead.

Which bacterium did Barry Marshall and Robin Warren show causes stomach ulcers?

Helicobacter pylori: when the pair found it in 1982, stress and lifestyle were thought to be the main causes of ulcers. It is now known to cause most of them, and a short course of antibiotics cures it.

How did Barry Marshall set out to prove that a bacterium causes stomach ulcers?

He drank a broth of it: within days he was vomiting, his breath stank, and a biopsy of his own stomach showed that the bacteria had taken hold and inflamed it.

Baoding balls, the chiming spheres rolled in the palm to relieve stress, are named after a city in which country?

China: Baoding is a city in Hebei province, south-west of Beijing. Rolling the pair around one palm works the fingers and wrist, so the balls are also used to rebuild hand strength after surgery.

Martin Seligman's 1960s "learned helplessness" experiments found which animals giving up on escaping shocks beyond their control?

Dogs: most simply lay down and whined, even once a way out was open. Fifty years on, Seligman and his colleague Steven Maier concluded they had it backward: passivity is the default, and it is control that is learned.

In Robert Bruce's 1963 cardiac stress test, what does the patient do?

Walk on a treadmill: the belt gets steadily faster and steeper while an ECG tracks the heart, and people who can't exercise are given a drug that makes the heart work harder instead.

A classic lab stress test has volunteers hold one hand for a minute or two in what?

Ice water: the "cold pressor test" sends blood pressure and heart rate up within a minute or two, and doctors introduced it in the 1930s to measure how sharply a person's blood pressure reacts.

In 1982 a Japanese government ministry coined the term shinrin-yoku for which stress-relieving pastime?

Forest bathing: the idea was simply to spend time among trees, and later field tests in 24 Japanese forests found lower cortisol, pulse rates and blood pressure there than on city streets.

In the 1950s cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman gave which label to driven, impatient patients they thought prone to heart attacks?

Type A: the pair credited an upholsterer, who pointed out that their waiting-room chairs were worn only on the armrests and front edges, as if the patients could not sit back and wait.

Shelley Taylor's "tend-and-befriend" theory says which hormone nudges stressed people to protect their young and seek allies?

Oxytocin: Taylor argued in 2000 that females under threat more often protect their young and band together than fight or flee, with oxytocin, female hormones and the body's own opioids at the core of the response.

Some orchestra musicians steady stage fright with propranolol, which belongs to which class of heart drugs?

Beta blockers: they stop the body's fight-or-flight signals from reaching the heart, so they calm a racing pulse and trembling hands, the physical symptoms of nerves, rather than the worry itself.

In the Trier Social Stress Test, participants give a speech and then tackle what?

Mental arithmetic: they count backwards from 1,022 in steps of 13 and must start again after every slip, while a panel of judges trained to keep a neutral face looks on.

The Trier Social Stress Test, the standard way to induce stress in a lab, was created in 1993 in which country?

Germany: Clemens Kirschbaum's team at the University of Trier found that their staged ordeal raised cortisol two- to fourfold every time, which earlier lab stressors had failed to do, so researchers worldwide adopted it.

Which is the most common type of headache?

Tension headache: it feels like a tight band squeezing the forehead and temples, yet despite the name researchers are still looking for a single cause, with tight muscles and stress only two of the suspects.

Robert Sapolsky's 1994 book on chronic stress asks why which animals don't get ulcers?

Zebras: for a zebra, stress is a short sprint away from a lion and then it is over, while people switch on the same bodily alarm for worries that never end, and that is what makes them ill.

What word completes the title of Epel and Blackburn's 2017 book on stress and ageing, The ___ Effect?

Telomere: telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, and in the authors' 2004 study of mothers caring for chronically ill children the most stressed women had caps that looked at least a decade older.

Exercise is credited with easing stress and lifting mood by releasing which of the body's chemicals?

Endorphins: the name blends "endogenous" and "morphine", because they latch onto the same receptors as opiate drugs, and they are widely credited with the calm that follows a hard workout.

Which nerve, whose Latin name means "wandering", carries the signals that slow the heart after a fright?

The vagus nerve: it winds from the brainstem all the way down to the gut, and doctors now treat some epilepsy and depression by stimulating it with an implanted device.

In the diathesis-stress model of mental illness, what does "diathesis" mean?

Predisposition: the model holds that a built-in vulnerability is not enough by itself, and that it takes life stress on top of it to bring a disorder such as depression or schizophrenia to the surface.

Psychologists Tedeschi and Calhoun coined which term for positive change reported after surviving an ordeal?

Post-traumatic growth: when the pair built a questionnaire to measure it in 1996, people who had lived through traumatic events reported more positive change in their lives than people who had not.

Suzanne Kobasa's psychological 'hardiness' combines commitment, control and which third attitude toward change?

Challenge: hardy people treat change as a chance to grow, not a threat. Kobasa found the trait by comparing executives under equally heavy stress, some of whom fell ill while others stayed healthy.

Which almond-shaped brain structure is central to processing fear and other emotional responses?

The amygdala: when it senses danger it sounds the alarm at once, without waiting for the thinking parts of the brain, which is how people leap out of the path of a car before they know they have decided to.

US regulators began publishing "stress tests" of the biggest banks after which event?

The 2008 financial crisis: in spring 2009 the Federal Reserve and other supervisors modelled how the 19 largest US banks would cope if the recession deepened and published the results, and the exercise later became a standing rule.

Sheldon Cohen linked chronic stress to greater susceptibility to which everyday illness?

The common cold: Cohen gave healthy volunteers nose drops of cold virus and quarantined them. Brief upsets made no difference, but troubles lasting a month or more, such as unemployment or family conflict, sharply raised the risk.

Which word did the author of The Wisdom of the Body coin in 1926 for the body's steady internal state?

Homeostasis: he built it from Greek roots meaning "similar" and "standing still", for the way the body keeps correcting its temperature, blood sugar and water balance, much as a thermostat holds a room steady.

Which North American animal is famous for "playing dead" when extreme fear overwhelms it?

Opossum: the act is no act. The animal slips into an involuntary state rather like fainting and lies limp with its mouth open and tongue out, sometimes for hours, until the danger has gone.

Which industry quietly funded the stress researcher Selye and used his work to defend itself in court?

Tobacco: company documents analysed in 2011 showed Selye had taken extensive industry funding, and that his work on stress was used to argue that smoking was not proven to cause heart disease or cancer.

Hans Selye began his stress research at McGill under James Collip, who had earlier helped purify which hormone?

Insulin: in Toronto in January 1922 Collip refined Banting and Best's crude pancreas extract into the first batch pure enough to treat patients, and a decade later he took on the young Selye.

Which term did a Harvard physiologist coin in 1942 for people apparently killed by sheer terror?

Voodoo death: he collected reports from doctors and anthropologists of healthy people who died within days of believing themselves cursed, and argued that unrelenting fear could wear the body down until its circulation failed.

What is cortisol called when used as a medication?

Hydrocortisone: the anti-itch cream sold without a prescription is the stress hormone itself. Cortisone, the more famous name, is mostly inactive until the body converts it into this.

Ashwagandha, a root sold worldwide as a stress-relieving supplement, comes from the traditional medicine of which country?

India: Ayurvedic healers have used the shrub for centuries, but US health officials note that many of the trials behind its stress claims were small, so the evidence is still too thin to be sure it works.

A 3 cm segment of scalp hair records roughly how long a period of cortisol exposure?

Three months: scalp hair grows about a centimetre a month and locks cortisol in as it forms, so each centimetre is a month's record of stress, where a blood or saliva sample catches only a moment.

Steroids are given before a premature birth to mature which organ, as fetal cortisol normally would?

The lungs: late in pregnancy cortisol spurs them to make surfactant, the slippery coating that stops the air sacs collapsing, so a mother likely to deliver early is given steroids to do the job sooner.

Which word do the letters of 'stressed' spell when read backwards, a favourite café chalkboard pun?

Desserts is 'stressed' in reverse, which makes the pair an anadrome: a word that turns into a different word when spelled backwards. A palindrome, by contrast, reads the same both ways.

Which insects name the nervous stomach flutter felt when stress hormones divert blood to the muscles?

Butterflies are real physiology: the blood vessels around the stomach constrict and its normal rhythmic contractions turn irregular, which produces the flutter. The same reaction dulls appetite before a big event.

Which French royal, whose hair reportedly turned white overnight after capture, names a stress syndrome?

Marie Antoinette's hair was said to have turned stark white after her capture on the flight to Varennes. Thomas More's reportedly did the same the night before his beheading, so the alleged condition also carries his name.

Which contagious behaviour shut a Tanganyika girls' boarding school in a stress-linked epidemic in 1962?

Laughter attacks began with three pupils and reached 95 of the school's 159 girls before spreading to the surrounding area. One later theory holds that the whole episode was induced by stress.

Which country grounds aircraft during the listening section of its high-stress Suneung college entrance exam?

South Korea halts take-offs and landings so that engine noise cannot disturb the English listening test. Many shops, banks and construction sites also close or pause on the day of the exam.

Which packaging material, invented in 1957 as a textured wallpaper, is now famous as a stress reliever?

Bubble wrap began when Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes tried to make a three-dimensional plastic wallpaper. Its satisfying pop is now celebrated on Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, the last Monday of January.

Which skin reaction to fear is a leftover reflex that makes furry animals look larger to enemies?

Goosebumps raise each body hair on end, which helps a frightened cat or a displaying chimpanzee look bigger. In sparsely haired humans under stress, the reflex is considered by some to be vestigial.

Which two-word term did the Palm Beach Post use in 1966 for dishes adults turn to under emotional stress?

Comfort food, the paper explained, is food tied to the security of childhood, like a mother's poached egg or chicken soup. Rich, high-calorie dishes can trigger the brain's reward system and briefly lift the mood.

Which Swahili phrase did lyricist Tim Rice turn into The Lion King's ode to carefree living?

Hakuna Matata is the motto Timon and Pumbaa, a meerkat and a warthog, teach the cub Simba so that he can forget his troubled past. The 1994 film translates it as 'no worries'.

Which palm-sized toy, sold as a stress reliever, became a 2017 craze that many schools barred?

Fidget spinner mania peaked in 2017, and school districts in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia soon outlawed the toys as a distraction. Sellers pitched them as aids for ADHD and autism, claims that studies have not backed.

Which stress-triggered sleep disorder names a 2002 Al Pacino thriller set under Alaska's endless daylight?

Insomnia is often set off by a stressful work or life event, and it can linger after the event itself has passed. Between 10 and 30 percent of adults have it at any given time.

Which fight-or-flight hormone did Japanese chemist Jokichi Takamine isolate from animal glands in 1901?

Adrenaline was purified by Takamine from the glands of sheep and oxen, and a drug company trademarked the name in the United States. That trademark is why American medicine calls the same substance epinephrine.

Which slogan from a 1939 UK government poster became a global motto after a bookshop rediscovered it in 2000?

Keep Calm and Carry On was printed 2.45 million times but rarely displayed, so hardly anyone saw it during the war. A copy found in a box bought at auction by an Alnwick bookshop started the craze.

Which stress-raising phone habit did the Macquarie Dictionary honour as a word of the year for 2020?

Doomscrolling, reading one piece of bad news after another, took off during the pandemic and the 2020 United States election. The habit can leave people feeling anxious, depressed and isolated.

Before Hans Selye gave 'stress' a medical meaning, which science had long used the word for forces inside materials?

Physics had long used 'stress' for the internal distribution of a force acting on a body. Selye borrowed the word for medicine, defining it as the body's non-specific response to any demand placed upon it.

Which word for recovering well from stress comes from Latin roots meaning 'back' and 'to leap'?

Resilience entered English in the 1620s as the act of rebounding or springing back. The Latin verb behind it, resilire, joins re- ('back') to salire ('to jump').

Which Peanuts character popularised the term 'security blanket' by clutching one through every worry?

Linus van Pelt called it his 'security and happiness blanket' in a Peanuts collection printed in 1956. Such blankets existed before Charles Schulz drew one, but his strip made the phrase everyday English.

In which sitcom does a tape advise Frank Costanza to say 'Serenity now' to stop his blood pressure rising?

Seinfeld gave Frank the mantra in a 1997 episode, in which he hires his son George and George's childhood rival Lloyd Braun as computer telemarketers.

Which rock band recorded the 1981 UK number-one single 'Under Pressure' with David Bowie?

Queen earned their second UK number one with the duet, recorded in Montreux, Switzerland. Rapper Vanilla Ice later sampled it for 'Ice Ice Baby' without credit and, threatened with a lawsuit, had to share the songwriting.

Which artist painted The Scream, an 1893 image widely read as the universal anxiety of modern humanity?

Edvard Munch first created the image in 1893 and repeated it in several versions. Journalist Arthur Lubow called it 'an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time'.

Which abbreviation, proposed by forum user Jennifer Allen in 2010, names the relaxing tingles some get from whispers?

ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, a tingling that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. Whispering is among the best-known triggers.

Which daisy-like herb, studied for possible anti-anxiety effects, makes the bedtime tea Peter Rabbit's mother gives him?

Chamomile tea is what Mrs. Rabbit offers Peter as she puts him to bed after his escape from Mr. McGregor's garden. Research into whether the herb truly eases worry is still preliminary.

Which part of the body, quick to react to stress, holds a mesh of neurons nicknamed the 'second brain'?

The gut is run by the enteric nervous system, a mesh of at least 100 million neurons that can work independently of the brain. Stressful situations can alter both its lining and the microbes that live in it.

Onychophagia, recorded as an anxious tic since the sixteenth century, is the medical name for which habit?

Biting your nails was first described as a sign of anxiety in late sixteenth-century France. Doctors class it as an oral compulsive habit, and in children it often appears alongside ADHD.

Which pleasant event earns 13 points on the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, one more than a major holiday?

A vacation is one of the scale's 43 life events, each rated in 'life change units'. A person's total for the past year gives a rough estimate of how stress may affect their health.

Glossophobia, built on an ancient word for 'tongue', is the fear of which daunting everyday task?

Public speaking fear takes its name from glossa, meaning tongue, and phobos, meaning fear or dread. Sufferers often shake uncontrollably even before they face an audience.

Which brain region, which also controls body temperature and hunger, starts the body's stress hormone cascade?

Hypothalamus neurons release corticotropin-releasing hormone under stress, the first signal in the chain that ends with cortisol. The same region sets the body's thermostat, so every fever starts there.

Which seahorse-shaped brain structure, vital for long-term memory, is especially vulnerable to lasting stress?

Hippocampus tissue is packed with receptors for stress hormones, which is why it suffers more than most brain areas. People who lived through severe, long-lasting trauma show shrinkage there.

Which Central American country's highland people make tiny worry dolls to tuck under a child's pillow at bedtime?

Guatemala's worry dolls are made from wire, wool and colourful textile leftovers. Children tell a doll their fears and sorrows, then hide it under the pillow before going to sleep.

In which country are komboloi, strings of worry beads flicked through the fingers to pass the time, a tradition?

Greece's worry beads have no religious or ceremonial purpose, although the komboloi evolved from the knotted prayer rope. Shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis was among their famous collectors.

Which tranquilliser, launched by Roche in 1963, was America's best-selling medication throughout the 1970s?

Valium, prescribed mainly for anxiety, sold more than two billion tablets in 1978 alone. Chemist Leo Sternbach's team created the drug, known generically as diazepam, as the follow-up to their earlier Librium.

Which animal scientist built a 'hug machine' to ease her anxiety after watching cattle settle in a squeeze chute?

Temple Grandin got the idea on her aunt's Arizona ranch, where pressure from the chute settled cattle being inoculated. Her machine applies the same deep pressure, which many autistic people use to soothe themselves.

Which 2014 Bessel van der Kolk book about trauma and stress became a long-running New York Times bestseller?

The Body Keeps the Score describes how the stress of trauma affects both mind and body. A surge of public interest in trauma after the pandemic turned the dense, scientific text into a runaway success years after it appeared.

Which Marvel hero did artist Jack Kirby say was inspired by seeing a woman lift a car to save her baby?

The Hulk dramatises what researchers call hysterical strength: extreme power shown in life-and-death moments. Most real-world examples, such as parents lifting vehicles off their children, are anecdotes based on hearsay.

Which name, credited to golfer Tommy Armour, describes the sudden nervy twitches that ruin short putts?

The yips, Armour said, were what drove him to abandon tournament play. Doctors now document the problem as a movement disorder, and performance anxiety is among its causes.

Which adjective for physical symptoms worsened by stress joins ancient words for 'mind' and 'body'?

Psychosomatic dates from 1847, when it meant 'pertaining to the relation between mind and body'. It pairs psykhē, 'mind', with sōma, 'body'.

The word 'stress' descends, by way of Old French, from the Latin verb stringere, which means what?

To draw tight is the meaning of stringere, the same verb that lies behind 'strain'. English 'stress' is also partly a shortening of 'distress'.

Breathing into a paper bag was long the remedy for which stress symptom that depletes carbon dioxide in the blood?

Hyperventilation was treated this way so that rebreathed air would restore carbon dioxide, but the method is no longer advised. Asthma and heart attacks can look similar, and rebreathing from a bag is dangerous in both.

Ohio State researchers found which bodily repair process took 40 percent longer in dental students under exam stress?

Wound healing slowed in every one of the eleven students: none healed as fast during exams as during the summer break. The same small cut in the roof of the mouth took about three days longer to close.

Which farm animals can inherit a 'stress syndrome' that can cause sudden death after transport?

Pigs with the inherited disorder overheat dangerously when stress, intense exercise or the anaesthetic halothane floods their muscles with calcium. Vets also call the condition malignant hyperthermia.

The males of which mouse-like Australian marsupial all die after one frantic breeding season, worn out by stress?

Antechinus males mate so intensely over about two weeks that a surge of stress hormones wrecks their immune systems and causes internal bleeding. The brown species is the smallest mammal known to breed only once.

Which diagnosis, nicknamed 'Americanitis', did neurologist George Beard blame on the strain of modern civilisation?

Neurasthenia covered fatigue, anxiety and low mood, which Beard put down to drained nervous energy. Philosopher William James, who was diagnosed with it himself, popularised the 'Americanitis' nickname.

Which two-word term did Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar coin in 1993 for the body's wear and tear from chronic stress?

Allostatic load builds as a person is exposed to repeated or chronic stress. Researchers usually measure it with a composite index of biomarkers from the hormonal, cardiovascular, immune and metabolic systems.

Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen coined which name for the science of how stress and the mind affect immunity?

Psychoneuroimmunology grew from a 1975 experiment in which rats were conditioned with saccharin-sweetened water. Afterwards the sweet taste alone was linked to weakened immunity, and some of the animals died.

Which health insurer ran the landmark ACE study of childhood adversity with the CDC from San Diego?

Kaiser Permanente's obesity programme supplied the first clue: about half its participants dropped out even though they were losing weight. Interviews by Vincent Felitti revealed that a majority had been abused as children.

Which term did Aaron Antonovsky coin for the study of why some people stay healthy despite constant stress?

Salutogenesis began with Antonovsky's study of Holocaust survivors, some of whom thrived later in life despite what they had endured. The medical sociologist asked what makes people healthy, not what makes them sick.

Which city suffered the 'dancing plague' of 1518, an outbreak often explained as stress-induced mass hysteria?

Strasbourg's outbreak began in July when a woman known as Frau Troffea started dancing fervently in the street, and it lasted into September. Records agree that the victims danced; nobody knows why.

Which nickname was given to Da Costa's syndrome, an anxiety-like disorder described in American Civil War troops?

Soldier's heart was a set of symptoms resembling heart disease, including palpitations, breathlessness and fatigue on exertion. Physician Jacob Mendes Da Costa described it in men fighting that war.

In Joseph Brady's 1958 study of stress, which 'executive' animals pressed levers to avoid electric shocks?

Monkeys sat in restraining chairs and received an electric shock every 20 seconds unless they pressed a lever in time. Brady reported what happened to their stomachs in Scientific American as 'Ulcers in Executive Monkeys'.

Sherman James named a draining style of coping with prolonged stress after which American folk hero?

John Henry, in the legend, worked hard enough to beat a steam-powered machine and died from the effort. James took the name from a man he interviewed, John Henry Martin, who had escaped sharecropping at a cost to his health.