Module 43 Stress and Illness
Stress often strikes without warning. Imagine being 21-year-old Ben Carpenter, who experienced the world’s wildest and fastest wheelchair ride. As he crossed a street, the light changed and a semitruck started moving into the intersection. When they bumped, Ben’s wheelchair handles got stuck in the truck’s grille. The driver, who hadn’t seen Ben and couldn’t hear his cries for help, took off down the highway, pushing the wheelchair at 50 miles per hour until reaching his destination two miles away. “It was very scary,” said Ben.
Extreme stress From the audio recording of a 911 caller reporting Ben Carpenter’s distress: “You are not going to believe this. There is a semitruck pushing a guy in a wheelchair on Red Arrow highway!”
How often do you experience stress in your daily life? For many students, the high school years, with their new relationships and more demanding challenges, prove stressful. Deadlines loom at the end of each term. The time demands of volunteering, sports, music and theater, work, college prep courses, and college applications combine with occasional family tensions and success pressures. Sometimes it’s enough to give you a headache or disrupt sleep.
Do you feel differently about stressful situations that seem imposed on you (assignments, deadlines, tragic events) than about the stress you impose on yourself (adventures, challenges, happy changes)? As we will see, our interpretation of events affects our experience of those events and whether we even consider them stressful. In this section, we take a closer look at stress—what it is and how it affects our health and well-being. Let’s begin with some basic terms.