The name stress was first used by the endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s to identify physiological responses in laboratory animals. He later broadened and popularized the hypothesis to include the perceptions and responses of humans trying to adapt to the challenges of everyday life. Stress, in Selye's terminology, refers to the hit of the organism, and stressor to the perceived threat.

But a new unsystematic usage developed out of Hans Seyle's experiments of his laboratory experiments in the 1930s. Selye started to custom the language to refer not just to the agent http://www.logosurfing.com/ but to the state of the organism as it responded and adapted to the environment. His theories of a universal non-specific stress response attracted high interest and contention in academic physiology and he undertook commodious research programmes and publication efforts.