| These are stressful times, indeed. As I write, the U.S. is limbering up for a full-scale war against Iraq, with or without international sanction. In response, Osama bin Laden (or an OBL sound-alike) has threatened new and intensified terrorist attacks on the West.
At the same time, North Korea brags of its ability to nuke Seattle, if need be, prompting Japan to consider the merits of a pre-emptive strike on its neighbour. Oh, and forgotten among all this, India and Pakistan remain on the verge of an all-out nuclear Armageddon.
Ah, for the good old days of the Cold War.
On the personal front, I’ve just come through two weeks of gruelling interviews for various jobs, none of which I now look like getting. The stress of preparation and anticipation gave way to the stress of presentation and performance, in turn to be succeeded by the delicious new stress of deflation and self-doubt about the future.
But I find comfort, of a sort, in the knowledge that I’m not alone. Stress is probably the dominant characteristic of the modern world. The modern industrialized world, that is, for stress as we know it appears to have come about as a byproduct of the 19th century industrial revolution. The upheaval and relocation of old organic rural communities into the mechanistic and harshly disciplined world of the industrial city had an inevitable toll on the human psyche. Marx called it "alienation." Durkheim called it "anomie." We simply call it "stress."
So pervasive has stress become that it’s now part of the modern lexicon. Not just that, but it actually stands as a positive test of the individual – slogans like "Can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," and Wall Street’s "Lunch is for wimps" all signify this belief.
Blame Nietzsche. I do. He started this whole trend in the late 1800s when he wrote, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Bollocks. That which doesn’t kill us usually leaves us scarred and bitter. And it certainly doesn’t make us better. In any case, Nietzsche died a sad and demented man at the premature age of 55, and so hardly qualifies as a poster-boy for the stress-filled life.
Yet it turns out that old Friedrich N. may have been on to something after all. In recent years, anthropologists and paleo-biologists have taken an increasing interest in the evolution of stress among prehistoric humans. After all, there must have been some evolutionary advantage to stress in the first place or, presumably, it would have been weeded out as a non-useful trait via natural selection. Not surprisingly, most such studies emphasize the flight-or-fight origins of stress. Presented with a sudden danger (for some reasons, it’s always a sabre-toothed tiger in the studies), prehistoric man had to make a quick choice either to run away or stay and do battle. In either event, those bodies that reacted the quickest – increasing the heart rate and blood pressure, thereby providing more energy – had a better chance of survival, and so lived to pass on their genes.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, then, stress was vital to human survival. But the studies suggest it was a sporadic or episodic affair, coming into play only in extreme emergencies. The actual lifestyle of the caveman was unlikely to have been characterized by stress on a daily level. And with good reason: the human body cannot sustain high levels of stress over prolonged periods.
So here we are today – hard-wired by millennia of evolution to experience stress, so much so that it’s part of the human condition. But our lives are now so dominated by sources of stress – war, the environment, jobs, marriages, overwork, and so on – that it’s no longer the rare, emergency-based sensation that it originally was. No wonder, then, that recent decades have seen all manner of "stress management" books, clubs, courses, videos, TV shows, etc. spring up to deal with the problem.
But can they? I mean, can the problem – which is really only a symptom – be "managed" if the actual cause – our very way of life – remains unchanged? Moreover, can something that took thousands of years to evolve be easily removed in a single generation?
Here are some of the ways for combating stress found on the Internet: set priorities correctly and realistically; visualize calm and relaxing situations; breathe deeply; meditate; exercise; and talk to others.
This is all fine, good and well-intended, but such remedies strike me as somewhat unrealistic – if I could do all that, then I wouldn’t be stressed out in the first place. The cause of stress remains untouched, certain to return once I’ve stopped huffing and puffing or whatever.
But perhaps that’s just me – I don’t handle stress well. This raises another question: if some people can deal with stress and some can’t, then is it really a chemo-biological reaction to external stimuli or is it how the individual processes that reaction? In other words, is it of psychological rather than physical origin?
Who knows? What’s more interesting, perhaps, is the idea of a world without any stress at all. No doubt, given time, the gene-therapy docs could come up with a way of isolating and weaning out stress entirely. But if so, would we be better off? Those with their hands up should take another look at Thomas More’s Utopia, in which he depicts a calm but unremittingly dull and lifeless world.
Or consider this: when the bombs start to fall on Baghdad, when the nukes start to fly across Kashmir, and when chemical warfare becomes a reality in North America, is "Honey, what’s on the other channel?" really an appropriate response? |
