So stress lah
YOU’VE got one appointment after another and more deadlines ahead. Meanwhile, your smartphone keeps beeping with reminders about your private obligations in text messages, e-mails and social network postings.
The nearly non-stop pace of modern life can be harmful to psychological health, say psychiatric experts, who are calling for more research into lifestyle as a health risk factor.
“Everyone’s supposed to be productive, attractive and youthful as long as possible. This affects people’s behaviour,” notes leading psychiatrist Dr Iris Hauth.
“I wouldn’t say lifestyle causes illness. But it brings about behavioural and emotional changes that could become risk factors for illness.”
Prevention and therapy are possible, she adds.
Her concerns aren’t really reflected in statistics, she concedes, pointing out that the incidence of “genuine” mental illnesses such as depression, addiction and anxiety disorders haven’t increased in the last 15 years.
“What’s increasing, though, are complaints below the threshold of an actual psychiatric diagnosis,” she says.
In her capacity as the head physician in a Berlin hospital for psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine, she said she was seeing, for instance, more and more young people in the emergency department suffering from exam or relationship stress.
Other manifestations of stress today, Dr Hauth says, include parents who try to get their hyperactive child through school with the aid of pills; people who worry about whether they spend too much time online and women who are preoccupied with their appearance; and develop body dysmorphic disorder, an obsession with perceived flaws.
What’s more, up to 5% of the working population use braindoping drugs to boost performance, notes Dr Claus Normann, a psychiatry professor.
And the number is rising. “The percentage among university students is probably higher,” he says.
How well people cope with stress depends largely on their constitution.
People with low self- esteem, in particular, feel the pressure of self-optimisation, Dr Hauth says.
“Having sufficient self-esteem, though – which is down to personality, heredity and experiences during the first 15 to 20 years of life – is a key resilience factor” enabling one to bounce back from adversity and stay psychologically healthy, she remarks.
Everyone can do something to ease stress. Dr Hauth advises taking one’s foot off the accelerator, so to speak.
“Doing nothing every once in a while is unbelievably beneficial to psychological health,” she says, adding that one shouldn’t feel the need to partake in everything the modern world has to offer.
Dr Hauth says she gets her patients to focus on their successes, not deficits.
And she advises cultivating social contacts, because loners who feel isolated are at a higher risk of psychological illnesses than people in healthy relationships.
In some quarters people seeking to de-stress are looking to Denmark, ranked by surveys as the world’s most contented nation.
The Danes say the key is “hygge”, usually translated as “cosiness”,
Doing as the Danes do is quite easy: Go indoors, light a candle, switch off your cell phone, make yourself a cup of hot cocoa, lean back and relax. – dpa