Elaine Showalter
This year a television cartoon character named Stressed Eric has been appealing to the modern psyche as the new Everyman.
Hamlet had melancholy, Jimmy Porter was an angry young man and Eric has stress. From the time he gets up in the morning till he collapses in bed at night, Eric is pressured, disoriented and frustrated. If he has an appliance, it breaks; if there’s a puddle, he steps in it. And the next-door neighbours outclass him in everything from accent to offspring. No wonder he looks like cartoon hell.
Of course, there’s help for Eric if he wants it. Indeed, stress management is to marketing in the Nineties what “low-fat” was in the Eighties, with more than 400 000 references on the Internet alone.
Bookshops have whole sections on calm, inner peace and cutting back. The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Managing Stress is in demand and stress-management counsellors make a bundle setting up courses in the workplace. You can soothe your stress with aromatherapy, bubble baths, shiatsu massage, meditation and camomile tea, and decompress with the most popular alternative medicine of all, retail therapy.
But now stress is facing a backlash. Rohan Candappa, who cites his years as an advertising copywriter as the source of his expertise, has written The Little Book Of Stress, which offers “simple teachings” to help us increase our level of stress – “Because without stress we would all be very, very, very nice. And stomach-churningly contented. And, in all honesty, who wants to live in a world like that?”
American observers have noticed that in the United States the trend is shifting and the new phenomenon is “Thank God it’s Monday” as employees joyfully return to the calm, supportive and user-friendly environments of the workplace after a stressful weekend at home.
At a UKconference on stress, actress Dame Judi Dench argued that stress aids creativity and performance. She declared in a letter to the conference: “I think stress is a much over-used word, and often attributed to circumstances which are more exhilarating than stress-inducing. Many actors suffer from first-night nerves but this can very often give an edge in their performance. In its broadest sense, everyone has a stressful life but very few would consider they need counselling on how to lead a less stressful life. In fact many people survive on it.”
Stress specialists insist that we are living in the Age Of Stress, under more pressure today than ever before because of the rapidity of social change, technological progress and “occupational discontinuity”.
A London trichologist claims stress makes high-flying career women lose their hair, as “women’s changing role in society is making them more male-like … They are becoming more sensitive to the normal circulation of male hormones in their bodies.”
The major stress problems are in the workplace, where heavy workloads, inflexible hours, job insecurity and the problems of balancing work and home are alleged to take a terrible toll.
Some companies are checking up on absentees and most are starting expensive workplace counselling schemes; but in a litigious society, employees seeking compensation are far more numerous.
Certain British soldiers who served with the United Nations forces in Bosnia are even suing the Ministry of Defence for post-traumatic stress related to atrocities they saw near Tuzla.
In the US, employees regularly use sickness time for a “marital health day” of shopping. In France, says historian Marc Ferro, stress-related absences from work are replacing the strike as the most basic form of industrial protest.
Stress itself has been a recognised problem for a long time. A century ago, doctors were warning that going to university was so stressful for women they were becoming sterile, and that the fast pace of modern life would destroy mental health.
In The Time Machine (1895), HG Wells argued exactly the opposite: that conflict, pressure and the Darwinian struggle for survival was the source of human imagination and progress. In Wells’s apocalyptic world, the stress-free Eloi have regressed to the intellectual level of five-year-olds. Their language is musical but primitive. They have short attention spans and their artistic sense has become purely decorative and hedonistic. And, of course, they are being eaten by the subterranean Morlocks, who represent the evolutionary extremes of industrial stress.
The writer Neil Ascherson sees The Time Machine as a parable of what could happen to a society in which half the population are Eloi, surfing the Internet and monitoring their anxiety levels; and the other half are geared-up Morlocks, doing all the dirty work and repairing the computers when they crash.
The daily pressures seen as an inevitable part of the human condition, and the crises seen as challenges to be surmounted, became psychologised in the 1950s when Dr Hans Selye popularised the concept of stress as a physical response to psychological demands.
The most influential work on stress was a “life events chart” that assigned points to a variety of situations, from a death in the family to celebrating Christmas. Unfortunately, the psyche doesn’t seem to know the difference between good and bad news, so winning the lottery is just as stressful as getting a divorce.
Psychiatrists Simon Wessley, Matthew Hotopf and Michael Sharpe point out in a recent study that “stress is a notoriously unreliable term, difficult to define, subjective in nature and prone to recall bias”. We do know that “acute psycho- social disturbance” is linked with alterations in immune function and other physical symptoms.
But stress can cover every kind of daily hassle. “It tends to be a catch-all term for a lot of complex feelings,” says psychologist Glen Weber. “There are plenty of people who need an element of stress.”
Counsellors recognise at least two varieties of stress – eustress, or the pressure that gets you going and is essential to growth; and distress, the pressure that gets you down. The problem is that my eustress may be your distress. No two individuals exposed to the same stressor will react in the same way.
You can fight your stress or learn to thrive on it and make it work for you, by using it to trigger change, learning and growth. I used to take time off for hydrotherapy, where I would happily paddle in the conspicuously labelled slow lane, outpaced by a pregnant woman and a one- legged man.
At the end of the day, however, I was just as frazzled. It works much better, I’ve found, to juggle lots of deadlines and to switch between tasks. Even personal crisis can be an opportunity.
So pull up your socks: learn to love your stress.