The stress of modern life
Without stress, nothing worthwhile would get done, says Eilis O’Hanlon, so perhaps be careful what you wish for
HELL is other people. So said French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. It appears those other people agree with him, at least when it comes to the workplace, with a new survey finding that colleagues are the fourth most common reason for stress in the office. Only insufficient pay and recognition, and having too much work to do to begin with, cause more aggravation.
Some of the headaches identified by the 2,000 respondents will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been stuck in a job they didn’t like, including last-minute deadlines and doing speeches or presentations. Even the contestants on The Apprentice don’t like doing presentations, even with the tempting prospect of a £250,000 investment from Lord Sugar to inspire them.
But a white-collar professional complaining about deadlines does resemble a deep sea diver complaining about all that water, or a judge moaning that the wig is itchy. It goes with the territory. Very few people love their jobs. They’re just doing it to pay the bills, and because the alternative, unemployment, is worse.
Traditional stoicism seems to be in short supply in the modern workplace. The same survey found that one in two professionals is close to “breaking point” as a result of the stress they’re under at work. Can that really be right?
The figure is surely accurate, in that it reflects the answers people give when asked if they’re close to “breaking point”, wherever they’ve subjectively decided that point is, because it’s not the same for everyone. That doesn’t mean they are at breaking point. At the risk of being accused of a lack of sympathy, might it be that, when invited to self-diagnose, respondents tend to exaggerate a teensy bit?
Work is stressful by its nature. Stress isn’t even a bad thing, in manageable doses. It helps to get jobs done. Your body reacts accordingly when a deadline is approaching. Afterwards, you get a sense of achievement, which balances it out. If you’re not being properly rewarded for your work, that’s another matter, and, if the symptoms are not tackled early on, it can develop into acute stress, which is why burnout is now recognised as a serious medical disorder by the World Health Organisation. It’s still not the stress itself which is the problem.
People in the past worked 12-hour shifts in factories. That was pretty stressful too. They had to deal with infant mortality, poverty, disease, malnutrition, bad housing. They didn’t even have Netflix to relax with in the evening.
It’s important not to fall into the trap of telling people who are genuinely suffering from stress to stop feeling sorry for themselves just because other people or previous generations had it so much harder. By that token, people in workhouses shouldn’t have complained either, because they were still considerably better off than medieval peasants during the Black Death. But it should equally be possible to be supportive of professionals struggling at work while also being aware that there is just as much stress in unemployment, or a dead end job, or sitting at home with young children, bored out of your skull. It’s just a different form of stress.
It’s about finding healthy ways to manage normal stress. That’s where we’re falling down, and the dysfunctional nature of modern life is itself part of the problem. It could even be that psychological distress is a rational reaction to a broken world that feels increasingly beyond one’s control. If so, then that malfunction may also be manifesting itself in the solutions which society has chosen to embrace.
Is depression more talked about now simply because there’s more of it about, or does its increasing prominence as an issue boost self-reported levels of depression?
Stress seems to be following the same path as depression and anxiety. More awareness of these related conditions ought to be a good thing, but it also means that people, once they recognise the symptoms and approach doctors for help, end up taking more medication. One famous study found fewer than half of those diagnosed with bipolar disorder actually had the condition, while over diagnosis of hyperactivity led to millions of children being put on strong psychostimulants. We should beware of medicalising stress in the same way. The world it creates can cause serious damage to mental health too.
‘No job, or a dead end job, is stressful too’