Stress

Years ago, when I worked at major office manufacturing company as a maintenance dood, I occasionally had to go to the work surface packaging area to repair something. The work surface packaging area consisted of many sizes of cardboard boxes into which the workers had to put work surfaces, or desktops. They also had to put Z-molding on the sides of the tops before they went into the boxes. Z-molding is the rubber bumper edge on much of the older work surfaces.
There was a man in this department, I will call him Jim, that was always stressed out over the smallest things. He was about 200 pounds overweight and was always yelling at somebody for some perceived offence. No matter what happened, whether the cardboard supply was low or one of the Z-molding rotary tables was malfunctioning, he would get completely worked up and give everybody hell. Consequently us maintenance guys would argue about who was going to get a verbal lashing from Jim, and our response time was very long.  I often wondered why a guy with such a simple job could get so stressed out over such a minor malfunction. Several times I remember thinking; what would this guy do if he had a real job?
This started me thinking about stress and how folks deal with it. It seems that some people rise to a certain level of stress no matter how little actual stress is warranted. It seems as if the human spirit will create stress even during an absence of it. As I give it a bit more of my limited brain power, (I was riding a bicycle at the time, so I didn’t need all of the thought process), I come to a potentially flawed conclusion;  The average human needs stress much like an engine needs a load. Have you ever noticed that a car, motorcycle, or even a lawnmower seems to run better under a load?

Is it possible that stress is the load that the human race needs to operate efficiently or effectively?