Stress Awareness Month should be a year
Only two weeks ago we were lamenting in this space the grim implications of International Day of Happiness, foremost among them the scant 24 hours provided, while things like financial literacy get their own entire month.
As it happens, it’s Financial Literacy Month right now, and that can be stressful for financial illiterates like me, so thankfully, it’s also Stress Awareness Month.
But if the people who get to do this weirdly universal scheduling have vastly undersold the quaint old notion of happiness, and they certainly have, what they’ve done to stress borders on the criminal.
All year round
Stress, in any of its varied forms, whether it manifests in a mild case of the jitters or a vague sense of dread, a difficult round of anxiety or a full-on panic attack, knows no months or seasons. There is a thing called Seasonal Affective Disorder, a wintry mix of ennui and depression symptoms linked to a dearth of sunlight, but it’s ill-defined and temporary.
Stress is different. Your stress awareness may peak in April, particularly on National Stress Awareness Day (April 16), but make no mistake, on May 1, your stress is likely to wake up next to you in all of its restless glory. See also, June, July, etc. Stress is not your fault. External factors are to blame, mostly, but once you’re stressed, your stress sensors are alert for everything, even stimuli that shouldn’t stress you but now somehow do. I can’t so much as turn on my laptop, for example, without it unleashing a half dozen irritants at once.
There was a problem with my roaming profile? Not again.
The procedure entry point could not be located in the dynamic link library? Ask the librarian. I haven’t touched a single key yet.
There’s been a suspicious login, from China. Tell me about it. Wait, don’t tell me about it.
Then, in my email, a series of unsolicited questions, some actually quite stressful. From the New York Times: Is cabbage the new bacon? I sure as hell hope not!
And off we go into a quotidian jungle of nerve-tweaking stimuli that’s way more likely to inflate rather than deflate stress — from considering how the Russians are channeling disinformation into the U.S. Congress to promote American isolation, to trying to decide whether to be in or out of the Path of Totality (wasn’t that a Star Wars sequel?) — right up to the moment you can go back to sleep.
Sleep doesn’t help
Sleep, rather than occupying its rightful place as stress oasis, is currently being presented as the cause of all this. People, particularly female people, are sleeping so poorly that it’s exacerbating their waking stress.
In a study conducted by SleepFoundation.org, twice as many women woke up feeling tired every day as men, twice as many lost sleep because they were worried about things they had to do the next day, twice as many lost sleep thinking of things they forgot to do the day before, twice as many lost sleep thinking they were going to oversleep, and five-to-six times as many lost sleep because they thought they heard someone downstairs.
Hey, it’s data.
Experts will tell you that quality sleep enhances cognitive clarity, regulates emotions, strengthens the immune system, and builds up our abilities to cope with stress. So, big picture: Poor quality sleep, caused by stress, can lower our ability to deal with stress, which causes poor sleep, which leads to stress.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me stress is winning and winning big.
There’s nothing terribly productive about speculation on the role of stress in America’s burgeoning mental health crisis, which is complex and demographically universal. No one stands outside that particular path of totality. Not to put too fine a point on it, but more than half our presidential candidates are obviously unwell.
To what extent we can mitigate our national anxiety is unclear, but it’s exceedingly difficult given the daily bombardment of noxious headlines, pressing deadlines, and the precisely targeted algorithmic fearmongering of the free market.
People of a certain age in America can’t get through a day without hearing of 500 or more potentially fatal side effects of the overpriced medication they’re taking. People who should be whistling a happy tune can’t always do it while they consider that the little pill with the big story to tell may cause a rare life-threatening bacterial infection in the skin of the perineum.
What works? The Pirates and Rachmaninoff
Stress? Oh, we got stress. You can go online and find all manner of suggestions for reducing stress, but that can be stressful. What works for me might not work for you, but what works for me, a least a little, is to turn the TV to a baseball game (so far, even the Pirates will work), hit the mute button, listen to Rachmaninoff, and read a book between the pitches.
Just don’t fall asleep; that’s when the trouble starts.