Are the overhead lights in my office going to kill me?

As a person who frequently describes herself as "stressed," I am drawn to Chapter 12: Stress, Coping and Health. The Chapter outline hints at some rich reading and plenty of opportunity to examine the topic at multiple levels of analysis. Stress is a big topic in the culture and something I am interested in for personal as well as academic reasons but the chapter points out that even agreeing on a common definition of stress is challenging. I am eager to learn more about the evolving conception of stress (from an engineering term to physiological phenomena) and about the different approaches to its study: 'stressors as stimuli,' 'stress as transaction,' and 'stress as response.' I'd like to know more about individual variation in stress response and what the current thinking is regarding amelioration of stress-related diseases and other harmful stress effects. Lately I have frequently heard references to the negative health effects of stress hormones, specifically cortisol. I am curious to examine the science so I can decide how freaked out I should be when my co-worker tells me that "THE OVERHEAD LIGHTS IN OUR OFFICE CAUSE STRESS HORMONES TO BE RELEASED ON OUR BODIES!!!" Just kidding, chapter 1 made it abundantly clear that we are not supposed to seek easy answers to complicated questions. Seriously though, this chapter looks fascinating. My initial impression is that stress impacts many other things we'll learn about and that it is not a stand-alone phenomena but rather a variable, like genes and environment etc, which interacts with other variables. Finally, I'm curious about Chapter 12 because of the inclusion of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. I'm curious to see how the book judges these strategies and why the author chose to include them in this particular chapter.
If you're looking forward to Ch 12, I recommend this radiolab episode about stress. It's pretty rad.