"We can say that the concept of stress 'makes up' or produces people who can act and think about themselves in certain ways and not in others. People who are 'stressed' can feel in certain ways: they can be anxious, irritable, depressed. They can behave in certain ways: overeat or drink too much or not take care of themselves. They can develop illnesses because their immune systems are out of whack. They can see themselves as overwhelmed and/or out of control. Of course, this does not describe the entire universe of how 'stressed' people can feel, behave, or perceive themselves, but you get the idea. I'm not saying here that experiences aren't stressful or that people don't experience something called stress. What I am saying is that at other times in our history, when the stress concept didn't exist, we couldn't experience ourselves in the way that stress both describes and delimits.
"When people believe that feeling 'stressed' ruins their relationships, their work lives, and/or their health, they feel impelled to do something about it. The idea that people should constantly monitor themselves for signs of stress speaks to what Michel Foucault termed 'technologies of the self,' practices that, as he put it, enable people to 'operate on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.' "
