Stress

There have been so many books written in the past about stress, approximately none of which I have ever read. Something that has occurred to me recently, is that pretty much every person you ever meet will tell you that they are under stress.

I certainly feel like I have a stressful life. I work (just) inside the walls of the City of London and it stands to reason that life is stressful for anyone in that situation. But then you ask a 16 year old about to sit their GCSEs and they will tell you that they are under, like, the most unbelievable stress right. I look back at those exams now and wonder why I even worried about them at all.

In fact, I don’t think I know anybody who would tell me that they don’t have any stress in their lives. That they sleep soundly through the night, have the right amount of money to live the life they want to live; have no conflict to deal with.

All of this makes me think that perhaps stress is just a state of mind. I know that’s probably obvious to anybody with any kind of grounding in psychology or an understanding of how the brain works, but when you think about it, it’s your brain that creates most of the stress you experience rather than external factors like exams or money or work or family conflicts. I wonder (and this is my own original thought even if it has been thought a thousand times before by other people) if this is something that humans have managed to evolve for a reason.

Without stress, what would we be? The majority of people in the western world, certainly in my generation, have grown up without really experiencing any kind of genuine threat to our lives. I have never gone hungry; there have always been jobs available even if they aren’t necessarily the jobs I would have chosen. Even if everything goes wrong and I lose my job or ability to work, there are people that would support me and look after me.

So maybe stress is some kind of evolutionary defence mechanism that we have as human beings in order to keep us functioning as well as possible. We have very few natural predators (in central London at least) and without that sense of pressure, maybe we would just start to take things a bit easy and stop evolving. I would even put it into the same boat as theories about roller coasters and horror movies – why do we put ourselves through this voluntarily? It could be because we have little left to threaten us but we need our bodies and our minds to keep on form in case something dangerous comes along. (I will return to horror in future posts as I find this fascinating).

I haven’t seen any of the Stephen Fry documentary series “Last Chance to See”, but I recall him mentioning a parrot from that series called a kakapo that, having dealt with predators for generations, suddenly found itself completely free of threat. In a sense, the kakapo had the completely stress free life that we all crave. Which was delightful. Until suddenly some predators came along again and started eating up the kakapo. The poor old parrot, comfortable and relaxed in the knowledge that all it had to do was just potter around, was suddenly finding itself being gobbled up by all these predators, who just couldn’t believe their luck. The kakapo had become so comfortable and trusting that it didn’t do anything to defend itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/animals/kakapo

Is there more stress in our society now than there was 50 or a hundred years ago? Probably not. I’ll never have to go to war, or worry about smallpox, but I’ll wager that I feel more everyday stress than an average 29 year old man in the 1960s. Maybe the key is just not to let the stress worry you too much.