Science Quote by Hans Selye

Selye isn’t selling optimism; he’s selling agency. As the scientist who gave modern culture the very word “stress,” he’s careful to frame it as raw physiological and psychological fuel, not a moral verdict. “Adopting the right attitude” lands with a kind of clinical provocation: the body may fire its alarms automatically, but the mind still negotiates what those alarms mean. Stress, in his formulation, is less an enemy than a signal - one that can be metabolized into vigilance, focus, and performance, or into rumination and collapse.

The subtext is an argument against the era’s growing tendency to treat stress as a contamination. Mid-20th-century life was accelerating: postwar work rhythms, consumer pressure, Cold War dread, the emerging managerial office. Selye’s research distinguished between distress and eustress, and this line is a layperson’s bridge to that distinction. He’s implying that “negative” is not an intrinsic property of the stimulus; it’s the product of appraisal, expectation, and perceived control. That’s why attitude is doing such heavy lifting here.

It works rhetorically because it’s both comforting and demanding. Comforting, because it reframes suffering as potentially useful. Demanding, because it quietly assigns responsibility: if stress is ruining you, perhaps you’re relating to it wrong. Read generously, it’s a call to build psychological skills and environments that expand choice under pressure. Read less generously, it’s a sentence that can be weaponized by bosses and self-help culture to individualize structural overload. Selye’s real point sits between: stress is inevitable; interpretation is leverage.