Read the following article from a newspaper. Six paragraphs have been removed. You must choose which of the paragraphs A-G match the numbered gaps 1-6. There is one extra paragraph which does not fit in any of the gaps.
The Pressure point Stressed out? Don't fret, enjoy it!
I recently gave a course on stress, which had nothing to do with stress management. It said that stress is magical and needful to our inner lives. This is a very unfashionable idea. Everyone knows that stress at work is the disease of our time. That it can kill. That it should be avoided at all cost by stress management techniques such as visualisation of calm scenes, aromatherapy and yoga.
1
In peace and war, stress has turned ordinary people into heroes and heroines. It can galvanise and inspire. Those who actively seek stress know the value of it, so why does current thinking suggest that we should avoid it?
2
Yet the word 'stress' is used to refer to both cause and effect, to what makes people feel stressed and to how they feel when they are stressed. Because of this conflation of stimulus and response, arousal has come to be blamed for the harm caused by threats and dangers.
3
This isn't necessarily so, although it may happen. Animals, for instance, subjected to long-term, uncontrollable pain and threat eventually resign themselves to their fate and then succumb to disease. This behaviour has been labelled 'learned helplessness' and human research supports this theory. Helplessness causes changes which affect the immune system and make the body more susceptible to disease.
4
The unsatisfactory scientific research into stress has had two consequences. First, it has led to the medicalisation of the normal stress response, turning a survival mechanism into a disease. Second, it has led to a lucrative, underqualified and largely unregulated industry of stress counsellors, offering to 'manage' and manipulate stress arousal and make it go away. An industry that says both overwork and underwork can be “stressful”. An industry whose techniques have been questioned by a number of scientific investigators as to their effectiveness and their purpose. An industry that encourages people to be calm about real threats they face at home and at work, when they should be getting off their backsides and doing something to help themselves.
5
There is one pattern to them all. Arousal, increasing tension and exhilaration leading to a resolution of the experience. By these activities we learn to survive. They toughen us up and help us to cope.
Yet nowadays, while every emphasis is placed on stressing the body to achieve physical fitness, stressing the brain is avoided. We are into mind flab in a big way.
6

A The problem here is not stress arousal, but failure to act on it. Doing nothing about a threat is clearly linked in the research literature to disease. Despair can be an anaesthetic but it is also a killer.
B In my course we look at society's training exercises for dealing with danger and actually go through with the arousal experience. Spectator sport, fairground rides, quizzes, thrillers and chillers of every kind, childhood dares and daredevil pursuits.
C Recently, I have been looking at the research on stress. Disturbingly, I found no agreed definition of the term. Stress arousal is a response to threat or challenge.
D My course was rather different. It featured clips from the climaxes of horror films, interviews with sports stars, creepy-crawlies (I have a giant metal spider named Esmerelda) and lots of evidence from the arts and sciences on stress arousal as the key to peak experiences.
E Lamentably, if we see somebody working flat out on a project, the fashion is to say 'they'll kill themselves', How sad and strange. In reality, triumphing over adversity can give people a tremendous sense of achievement.
F The experimental literature on stress and disease is also prone to another serious error. It says 'disease often follows stressful experience, so stress must cause disease.' In logic, this is a flaw known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc - which means that 'it followed it, therefore it was caused by it'.
G Third, it is my view that in the triumph over terror we find our greatest rewards. Such experiences help us to become mature and independent.