Much of the stress that we all experience is helpful and stimulating. The challenges of life tend to be stressful and an attempt to avoid stress completely would lead to a rather boring existence. The problem comes when you experience too much stress. Although some stress reactions are part of deeper and more serious emotional problems, many are not, and can be handled with relatively simple counseling and stress-management techniques. Use of the term stressor seems to imply that stress is being caused by some other person, situation, or event.
Stress is really an interactional process.
An accurate self-assessment will allow you to see your role and responsibility in stress reactions. For example, an honor student who is accustomed to getting A's receives a C on a paper. He assumes that his grades are going downhill and that he will not get into a good law school, and, therefore, will not be able to live out his life goal to become a law professor. He experiences great stress over this grade and is unable to sleep or to concentrate. In fact, he has mentally developed a negative scenario that makes little sense.