Modern stress research dates back to the 1930s when researcher Hans Selye published his ‘General Adaptation Syndrome’ theory of stress and disease. While Selye’s work was broadly adopted in sociology and psychology, medical researchers felt his emphasis on hormones was inadequate to explain the complexities of human disease and ultimately rejected stress theory. In the 1980s, Helmut Sies coined the phrase “Oxidative Stress” which sparked four decades of productive research into redox biology. I refer to this period as Stress Theory 2.0 because redox biology research has evolved to a place that fills most of the gaps in Selye’s original work. We can now explain why stress causes disease in credible biochemical terms.

For ordinary healthy consumers, the key understand is that our definition of stress needs to be much broader—anything our cells would understand as requiring an adaptive response. I use a simple mnemonic device to remember the eight kinds of stress, TOP SPEED:

Once you’ve broadened your definition of stress, you still need to understand how it affects your body. You need to understand redox imbalance.