One of the college classes I'm taking at Northeastern right now is about Stress Management. It goes at the topic from a variety of angles - biological, cultural, etc. It's quite interesting.
One thing it points out regularly is that stress hormones are *real* and have damaging effects on our bodies. So often we think that stress is "in our head" and can be ignored. Stress is a real, concrete thing happening to us. All sorts of chronic, serious damage is caused to our body parts as a result. So it's important to pay attention to stress and to work on it, just as one would work on having a serious disease.
