Selye, Eck and Watts
From one syndrome in rats in 1936 to two ratios on a hair chart
Hans Selye described the alarm, resistance and exhaustion stages. Paul Eck turned them into calcium/potassium and sodium/magnesium criteria, and David Watts at Trace Elements added a recovery stage read from sodium/potassium.
On 4 July 1936, Hans Selye of the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal published a one-page letter in Nature (volume 138, page 32) titled "A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents." He exposed rats to cold, surgical injury, spinal shock from transection of the cord, excessive muscular exercise, and sublethal doses of drugs including adrenaline, atropine, morphine and formaldehyde.
Selye recorded that all of these agents produced one syndrome, with symptoms independent of the damaging agent and of the drug's pharmacological type, representing a response to the damage itself. The constant features were changes in the adrenal glands, shrinkage of the thymus and other lymphatic (immune) tissue, and damage to the lining of the stomach and intestine. Because the same three changes followed cold, injury, exertion and a toxic dose alike, Selye classed them as a general response of the organism rather than a specific effect of any one agent.
Selye named the sequence the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) and divided it into three stages: the alarm reaction, the stage of resistance, and the stage of exhaustion. His 1950 review in the British Medical Journal, "Stress and the General Adaptation Syndrome" (volume 1, pages 1383 to 1392), set out the three stages and the role of the adrenal cortex in them.
The model separates the stressor, the agent that places a demand on the body, from stress, the body's response to that demand. That separation is what placed cold, injury, exertion and a toxic dose in one category. The Trace Elements, Inc. newsletter of April-May 2018 records Selye's position that the GAS response is the same regardless of the type of stressor, and his distinction between stress and distress, the destructive form.
The Analytical Research Labs (ARL) Stress Document carries Selye's position from Stress Without Distress that stress is neither good nor bad: without a certain amount of it, bones demineralize and muscles atrophy. Its working definition of stress is a state produced within an organism subject to a stimulus perceived as a threat, the stressor.
The term diseases of adaptation comes from Selye's stress model, and Trace Elements, Inc. defines it inside its own stage model. In the May-June 1990 newsletter, diseases of adaption occur when the body neither recovers nor exhausts. In the April-May 2018 newsletter, the adaption stage is chronic resistance without recovery. The same 2018 table lists a chronic alarm reading, an Na/K ratio that stays above 5.0, and associates it with a chronic inflammation trend.
The adrenal cortex hormones are the link the hair-test labs used. ARL classes aldosterone, a mineralocorticoid, as pro-inflammatory and equates it with sodium; it classes cortisol, a glucocorticoid, as anti-inflammatory and equates it with potassium. On that pairing the sodium/potassium (Na/K) ratio reads the balance between the two hormone classes. The Na/K ideal is 2.4 (Trace Elements) to 2.5 (ARL).
Later research by Bruce McEwen and colleagues, listed in the lineage of the 2018 Trace Elements newsletter, described allostasis, the body's ability to adapt to change due to stress, and allostatic overload, in which repeated stressors cause permanent physiological changes and tissue damage from failure to adapt.
Selye's papers describe the stages without a method for identifying which stage a person is in. ARL's Stress Document (1988) records the lineage that supplied one. George Watson, in Nutrition and Your Mind (1972), described fast and slow oxidation using blood and odor tests. Paul Eck derived the oxidation rate from hair mineral ratios, "thereby providing an accurate means to identify the stage of stress."
Two ratios set the oxidation type: calcium/potassium (Ca/K, the thyroid ratio) and sodium/magnesium (Na/Mg, the adrenal ratio). ARL's ideals are Ca/K 4 and Na/Mg 4.17. Trace Elements uses 4.2 and 4, so the balance points publish as ranges: Ca/K 4 to 4.2 and Na/Mg 4 to 4.17. The Stress Document's own criteria use ARL's figures:
| Selye stage (Stress Document) | Hair-test criteria (ARL) |
|---|---|
| Alarm stage, fast oxidation | Ca/K below 4:1 and Na/Mg above 4.17:1 |
| Exhaustion stage of fast oxidation | Ca/K below 4:1, Na/Mg above 4.17:1, and Na/K below 2.5:1 |
| Resistance stage, mixed oxidation | Ca/K above 4:1 with Na/Mg above 4.17:1, or Ca/K below 4:1 with Na/Mg below 4.17:1 |
| Exhaustion stage, slow oxidation | Ca/K above 4:1 with Na/Mg below 4.17:1, or Na/K below 2.5:1 |
The Stress Document estimates that ten to twenty percent of the American population is in the alarm stage at any given time. The oxidation type page gives the full fast, slow and mixed definitions.
Alarm. Calcium, magnesium and often zinc read low; sodium and potassium read relatively high. ARL records that in the alarm reaction the body stores or excretes calcium, magnesium, zinc and copper, and that this lowering produces the adaptive rise in metabolic rate, muscle tone and reflex speed. ARL's condition documents cite Selye for the faster kidney excretion of calcium and magnesium during the alarm reaction.
Resistance. The Stress Document identifies the resistance stage on a hair test as an Na/K inversion below 2.5:1, and records that it occurs in both fast and slow oxidizers. Cortisol (potassium) secretion is elevated in this stage.
Exhaustion. The Stress Document's stage descriptions give two hair patterns: a very slow oxidation rate with both the thyroid and adrenal ratios showing low glandular activity, or an Na/K ratio below 2.0:1. ARL's documents place the Na/K cutoffs as follows:
The Stress Document states its goal as a move from the exhaustion stage back to a higher-energy, earlier stage of stress. On successive retests, ARL reads progress as movement from exhaustion toward resistance and alarm. The oxidation rate swings page covers a rate that moves between tests.
David L. Watts of Trace Elements, Inc. extended Selye's three stages to five in the May-June 1990 newsletter: alarm, resistance, recovery, adaption and exhaustion. His stated rationale is that most everyday stress ends in recovery rather than exhaustion. Trace Elements reads the stages mainly from the Na/K ratio, and its figures changed between papers, so each carries its year:
| Stage | Na/K, 1990 | Na/K, 2018 | Hormonal driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alarm | 5:1 or higher | above 5.0 | Aldosterone; sodium and water retention; inflammatory trend |
| Resistance | below 2.4:1 | below 1.4 | Glucocorticoid dominant; catabolic |
| Recovery | returns to 2.4 | returns to 2.4 | Hormonal cascade lessens |
| Adaption | neither recovers nor exhausts | chronic resistance without recovery | Disease-of-adaptation trend |
| Exhaustion | inability to recover (2018) | — | |
The 2018 resistance cutoff of 1.4 is also the lower bound of the acceptable Na/K range, 1.4 to 3.4, in Trace Elements' November-December 2010 reference set. The 1990 paper records that nutritional deficiencies can leave the body unable to initiate the alarm reaction at all.
In the April-May 2018 newsletter (Volume 29, Number 1), Watts separated the fight-or-flight response, mediated by the adrenal medulla and the sympathetic nervous system, from ordinary day-to-day stress, which he described as governed largely by hormones of the adrenal cortex. He disagreed that normal daily stressors elicit fight-or-flight, and proposed that the differing stress responses of individuals follow their metabolic characteristics rather than the stressors. In a sympathetic (Fast) type he lists raised blood pressure, heart rate and glucose; in a parasympathetic (Slow) type, raised insulin, low blood sugar and low blood pressure.
The 2020 subtype paper places the stages inside Watts' eight metabolic types. Subtype 1 of each type is baseline dominance; subtype 2 is the alarm stage; subtype 3 is chronic resistance. Fast 4 shows both adrenal and thyroid activity reduced and converts to Slow 1. Slow 4 is controlled resistance, which Trace Elements describes as stress being handled properly with recovery expected. The paper states that each stage of stress must progress for normal recovery. Watts' own terms are Fast and Slow Metabolic types; the fast and slow oxidizer terms come from the Watson and Eck lineage.
ARL scores the stage from the oxidation type first, using Ca/K and Na/Mg, and reads Na/K as a second layer for resistance and exhaustion. Trace Elements scores the stage from Na/K first and places it on top of the Fast or Slow metabolic type. Both systems use the same hormone pairing, recorded in ARL's Adrenal Insufficiency document: aldosterone with sodium, cortisol with potassium.
On stage count, ARL keeps Selye's three stages plus the exhaustion stage of fast oxidation. Trace Elements uses five stages, with recovery at an Na/K of 2.4 as the expected outcome. The live article The Stress Stages on a Hair Test covers how a chart moves from fast to slow oxidation across successive tests.
Primary sources: Selye H. "A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents." Nature 1936;138:32. Selye H. "Stress and the General Adaptation Syndrome." British Medical Journal 1950;1(4667):1383-1392.
A hair tissue mineral analysis is a screening test for nutritional and toxic-element patterns. It does not diagnose, it does not establish a cause, and it does not measure what is circulating in blood today. Each mineral reading reflects roughly 2 to 3 months of hair growth. Where the laboratory literature describes a stress stage or a trend, that stage and that trend belong to the mineral pattern rather than to any person reading about it. Anything medical belongs with your own licensed provider.
I read the Ca/K and Na/Mg ratios first, against the two-lab ranges, a Ca/K between 4 and 4.2 and an Na/Mg between 4 and 4.17. Then I read the Na/K ratio against 2.4 to 2.5, because ARL places the resistance reading on that ratio and Trace Elements places both resistance and recovery there.
A stress stage is read across successive tests, retested every 3 to 5 months, since each test averages about 2 to 3 months of hair growth.
Rats exposed to cold, surgical injury, spinal shock, excessive muscular exercise or sublethal doses of drugs such as adrenaline, atropine, morphine and formaldehyde all developed the same syndrome: adrenal changes, shrinkage of the thymus and lymphatic tissue, and stomach and intestinal damage.
The alarm reaction, the stage of resistance and the stage of exhaustion, described by Hans Selye and set out in his 1950 British Medical Journal review.
In the criteria table of ARL's Stress Document, the alarm stage is fast oxidation (Ca/K below 4:1, Na/Mg above 4.17:1), the resistance stage is mixed oxidation, and the exhaustion stage is slow oxidation or an Na/K below 2.5:1. The same document's stage descriptions place resistance at an Na/K below 2.5:1 and exhaustion below 2.0:1.
A stage Trace Elements added in 1990, between resistance and exhaustion, read as the Na/K ratio returning to its ideal of 2.4. Watts' rationale is that most everyday stress ends in recovery.
A full hair tissue mineral analysis reports the Ca/K, Na/Mg and Na/K ratios on one chart, which are the three readings both labs use to place a pattern in a stress stage.
Published 2026-10-06 · Updated 2026-10-06
By Eileen Durfee — Practitioner, NBS (Nutritional Balancing Science), NASM-CPT; wellness educator, inventor and author.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Hair tissue mineral analysis is a screening test and is not diagnostic; anything medical belongs with your own licensed provider. Wellness Shopping Online is operated by Nuco Enterprise Solutions LLC.
