Stress was invented in 1936, when the Hungarian biologist Hans Selye defined it as "the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change". So while it would be unfair to blame Selye for the fact that modern life is so stressful, he does deserve some blame for the epidemic of articles about the "stress epidemic" - have you noticed how reading them stresses you out? - and for books such as Stress-Free In 30 Days, Stressproof Your Life, or The Complete Idiot's Guide To Overcoming Stress. (There's another book in that series, incidentally, called The Complete Idiot's Guide To Enhancing Self-Esteem: is that the most self-defeating self-help title ever?) In later life, Selye recanted: his English had been poor, he said and he hadn't meant to use the word "stress" at all. What he meant was something more like "strain".

The distinction matters. Because of how we use the word "stress" colloquially - and how physicists use it, too - it brings to mind an external force: it implies that the problem is whatever things (stressors) are pressing on us from outside. "Strain" is more faithful to Selye's intended meaning, which is that the problem lies in how we respond to those forces.

There's a certain comfort in thinking of stress as an external thing: it implies it's beyond your control, and so not your responsibility. It lets you feel busy, and may evoke sympathy; it relieves you of the obligation to change. But it also implies that the answer to reducing stress is avoiding that external thing. There's short-term relief in fleeing a stressful situation for a calm and peaceful one, but if the problem is really how we respond to "stressful" situations, that won't leave us better off next time. We're assailed by lifestyle suggestions promising stress reduction: blissful holidays, say, or downshifting to the country. But if you're using them to avoid things that trigger your negative responses, mightn't it be wiser to work on your responses instead?

That's the question motivating the study of what psychologists call "resilience", the characteristics that cause some to thrive amid what others call stress. Amanda Ripley's new book, The Unthinkable, examines who survives when faced with natural disasters or terrorism, and who doesn't. It's largely a matter of beliefs: survivors are those who think they have some control over external circumstances, and who see how even a negative experience might lead to growth. (Overconfident people, who overestimate their powers, do particularly well.) By its very nature, "thriving [in response to extreme stress] is a contradiction," Paul Pearsall says in The Beethoven Factor, his book about resilience. "It is about becoming stronger and being devastated at the same time."

Changing your beliefs is no mean feat. But just knowing that that's where stress is really located is a good start. That's not an argument for putting up with an insane job, relationship, or other circumstance. But it offers the possibility of making a choice - not getting submerged by stress, nor fleeing what triggers it, but doing what the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, quoted here before, calls "learning to stay".

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com