When Piers Morgan, the former Editor of the Daily Mirror, had a stressful day at work — hearing that Alastair Campbell had “stiffed him” by giving a story to another newspaper, for example, or discovering that his front page photographs of British soldiers supposedly humiliating Iraqi prisoners were not authenticated — he would “do some ridiculous things”.

“I would regularly punch the walls, often drawing blood from my knuckles,” he says. “Something would happen in my body whereby I couldn’t stop myself. Seeing Jeremy Clarkson brings on the same effect.”

Alternatively, he would turn to obscene amounts of booze, once downing a bottle of red wine in three minutes, or attack anyone and everyone who was unlucky enough to be near him. He calls his form of stress management the “Kevin Pietersen effect” — “if under pressure and boxed into a corner, I would go all out on the attack. I avoid anyone with calm in their lives; I surround myself with fellow adrenalin junkies. If I’ m going to go down, I’ll go down with fires blazing.”

The extremity of Morgan’s tactics matches his circumstances, perhaps, but few people could deny that they have had days when they would have liked to do the same thing.

Stress has become so common in modern parlance that the word trips off the tongue as readily as water. While our grandparents went marching off to war armed with a hipflask and a prayer, we latter-day heroes see a trip to Tesco, a day in the office or a traffic jam as an excuse to reach for the Prozac.

The Government has jumped on the bandwagon to boot. In 2004, it announced that stress had cost the UK economy £13.5 billion through lost productivity and increased illness at work. Dr Ray White, Chairman of the International Stress Management Association, says that during the past two years the number of organisations contacting his charity to seek advice has increased significantly.

The official definition of stress (as defined by the Health and Safety Executive) is “the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them”. Or, as Dr Frank Bond, senior lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths College, London, puts it, “dealing with a situation that we feel exceeds our ability to cope”.

According to Bond, nobody enjoys the feeling of stress, but those who are best able to manage it have high levels of what he calls “psychological flexibility” — a term increasingly used by academics and psychologists.

Those who are psychologically flexible put themselves in fearful situations to pursue their goals. “People who deal well with stress typically allow themselves to feel fear — an ability dictated either by genetics or by prior life experience,” says Dr Bond. “The point about psychological flexibility is that you use your fear for a constructive end. Running across the motorway won’t help your stress levels when you run across it next time, but giving a presentation at work that you are scared of giving will be a better experience second time round.”

Successful people have a history of being able to cope. They sleep well, eat well, take exercise and, crucially, have good relationships. “This could be with a partner, a spouse or a friend — what matters is that you have people in your life whom you can confide in.”

Usually when people say they are stressed, what they really mean is that they are afraid of feeling afraid or of looking stupid, says Dr Bond. “Those who deal badly with it will go out of their way to avoid situations where they experience those feelings. By doing that, they dig themselves into a hole, because they never build up the experience that would allow them to cope better when the next stressful situation arises.”

Therefore, people who manage stressful situations the best are actually thriving on the retrospective and predictive knowledge that they have successfully completed such tasks before and they will again. “They may feel anxious, but they are willing to experience that anxiety to get what they want.”

Dr Bond says that one of the reasons stress has become a modern affliction is that as a society we live in an increasingly complex world. “My grandfather never spent the morning shouting at his computer while trying to get online, for example,” he notes. But simplifying our lives is not the answer. “You have to look at your goals and work backwards. If you work in the media, it is no good becoming a gardener to avoid broadband fury — you will then become depressed because you are not doing what you want.”