The first records of destress come from the 1920s, but records of its sense meaning “to reduce anxiousness” come later, from the 1980s.ĭestress is still used in technical contexts, perhaps most commonly in linguistics. Stress may come from a variant of the word distress, which you should be careful not to confuse destress with.
Destress uses the prefix de-, which indicates removal, such as in words like declutter (“to remove clutter”) and dehumidify (“to remove humidity from the air”).
