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The good news is that it is possible to teach people to handle stress more effectively. Clare Harris is a visiting lecturer at the Praxis Centre for Developing Personal Effectiveness at the Cranfield School of Management, and although all of her students are being groomed for dealing with stress in the workplace, she says that her techniques can be adopted across the board.

The crux of the problem, she says, is to recognise stress, which often manifests itself by taking out one’s tension on others (something she calls “compassion fatigue”) — either by too much delegation or a lack of it. “Mostly, people become unnecessarily perfectionist,” she says. “They contract, both physically and mentally, which means that they lose sight of the big picture.”

Once this is recognised, she helps her students to understand what it is that makes them feel stressed. It is often those in, or training for, middle management who feel it worst, because they face a combination of minimal power and maximum layers of people to whom they are accountable. (Dr Bond adds that long-term studies on civil servants have shown that people who lack control over how they do their jobs are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease).

Ultimately, Harris explores coping strategies such as meditation, touch therapy and exercise. “It is amazing the difference that physical touch can make. Just a ten-minute massage through someone’s clothes during a lunch break, and a stressed person is immediately more relaxed and alert.”

Once over the initial macho attitude to the course, Harris says, her students find solace in companionship. “These are brave, energetic people who manage these things without discussing them. It is tremendously reassuring for them to know that they are not the only person who gets an upset stomach just before they have to make a presentation to the board, or who lies awake all night, or whose love life is rubbish.

“They often privately regard these things as signs of weakness that mustn’t be disclosed. Very few people, when I ask for a show of hands, say they never suffer from the physical effects of stress, and those who do tend to be very young.”

The physical consequences of stress are predictable and obvious, says Dr Thomas Stuttaford, the Times doctor. The cardiovascular system goes first (our heart races, we start sweating more readily), followed by the respiratory system (we suffer from “air hunger”), and the digestive system follows suit (loss of appetite, for both food and sex). The pursuit of tranquillisers might ensue — in the name of alcohol, drugs or cigarettes — and before you know it, stress has defeated you.

Mental tension is equally easy to decipher. “I’m f***ing fine,” goes the oft-repeated phrase, serving as an apposite example of why it is often one’s nearest and dearest who are the first to detect that we have overstepped the mark and moved from “healthy stress” to “distress”. Yet a certain amount of tension is not only good for us but vital to our wellbeing. This “healthy” stress is known as hormesis, and the best example of it is exercise. A hard work-out generates dangerous free radicals and acids, as well as mildly damaging muscle tissue. But it also stimulates the body to begin a process of repair, mopping up the free radicals and mending muscle.

“If you want to live a long and healthy life, quite the worst thing you can do is to avoid stress to either mind or body,” adds Professor Mario Kyriazis, medical adviser to the British Longevity Society. “Ageing is due to the loss of complexity in our system, and the way to boost complexity is to challenge the system. If you want to live long and healthily, don’t settle into routines.”

Whether or not we can learn to manage or appreciate stress, there are a rare few who can’t get enough of it, it seems. When Piers Morgan watched the cricket from the Oval last week, it took him straight back to the good old days, when stress was synonymous with breathing. “I hadn’t felt that kind of adrenalin since the days of the Iraq photos,” he says. “I felt that old fire in my belly again; it was glorious.”

Additional reporting by Ella Stimson