People Building

Stress Amongst The Wealth Life Has To Offer

If your great-great-grandparents fell through a hole in time and landed here today, they would dance for joy to see the miraculous advances we have made in technology, healthcare and entertainment. But soon they would also begin to wonder why, amid all this amazing stuff, do we look so stressed, anxious and snippy?
Credit crunch notwithstanding, our society is technologically and materially far richer than ever before in human history. It is much safer, too. But our levels of stress, anxiety and depression are higher than ever. So, too, are our rates of stress-related physical illnesses such as hypertension. The insurer, Aviva UK Health, says that psychological stress was the primary cause of sickness claims last year. A Coventry University study, meanwhile, shows that in some parts of the country almost two-thirds of workers say they are suffering from stress-induced depression. The Health and Safety Executive calculates that in 2008 alone 13.5 million working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety.

We are worrying ourselves sick. Along with all our marvellous technological toys we have created a cascade of vicious stress cycles. Not only have we created a giant social engine for accelerating our stress, we have also jettisoned many time-honoured ways for releasing the pressure. It is true that some people can thrive on stress. A combination of genes, life history and morale means that one person’s total overload can be another’s mere busyness. But relentless pressure is quite another matter, and has seriously damaging effects.

We have proved highly adept at using technology to stress ourselves. For example, we now create and consume such an unprecedented daily maelstrom of information — urgent e-mails, rolling news, celebrity scandal — that we become bewildered. So we try harder to suck in even more information, hoping somehow that we will find the one fact that makes sense of all the rest. Instead, we get more bewildered and stressed.

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