At the risk of appearing unduly churlish, I’m annoyed with our obsession with stress and anxiety these days. So many seem to proudly complain bitterly about having to endure stress in everyday life. “Not fair!…Why must I endure stress merely to achieve everything I want in life? It should be easy.” Sigh.
The word “stress” appears millions of times a day online. Do millions actually suffer from medically cognizable disabling stress? I seriously doubt it, yet a recent survey reported that between 30-50% of all people self-report stress as their biggest health problem.
Stress is a recognized disorder under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition). There’s nothing like naming something as a disease in an official publication to make it real, is there? To be fair, the Manual distinguishes everyday stress from the severe impairment type of stress, but I don’t think all the folks demanding attention because they’re stressed out have read the fine print.
For the historical buffs among us, stress was identified as a psychological condition in 1936 by Hans Seyle, a Hungarian shrink. It rapidly became a recognized mental disorder. It didn’t explode into everyone’s most favored and excellent diagnosis until the early 21st century. Is stress really a new thing? A 21st century malady? Do you really think the 21st century in America is the worse time and place to live? (Wow, I would have missed that on the SAT.) It’s seems common-sensical to conclude stress is a fundamental part of the human condition and has been with us always. Just as a for instance, consider Europe in the 14th century. Silly me, but I had sort of thought that constant warfare, the Black Death, regular famines and the fact that the aristos seemed to have thought it was just good fun to whack the heads off peasants would lead to some level of concern, which I suspect today we would diagnose as stress. They probably just shouted, “Oh, shit!” and tried to run away without a lot of reflection about their mental health. (And there were undoubtedly worse times to live than the 14th century…like most of human history.) Something tells me those stressors from the past would tower over nasty postings, online bullying and intimidation, distressing Facebook pictures showing everyone how silly you look when you dance and the inability to find the right probiotic at the grocery store.
I’m guessing it’s personally satisfying to transmogrify everyday stress into a disease (like being gluten intolerant, sort of?). If it’s a disease, you’re not responsible. You’re not responsible for catching a cold. You’re not responsible for your symptoms. In fact, you’re a victim! That’s so cool, so 21st century.
The real problem, of course, is that your stress is now my problem.
Okay, now for the obligatory acknowledgment that disabling stress and anxiety are real medical conditions and some people are indeed truly impaired. In this screed, I’m not thinking about them, I’m struggling with how so many perfectly normal people with very ordinary lives, enduring what heretofore we would assume to be normal levels of stress now embrace this notion of a medical condition, a debilitating level of stress and embrace the concept of stress as a reason to avoid responsibility, to avoid striving, to embrace victimhood and demand accommodation. (Back in the day, those poor sods getting shot, stabbed, infected with a fatal disease or starved didn’t even know that stress was a thing entitling them to accommodation, or at least a headstart next time they’re being chased by a villain from a Free Company.)
When the stress meme has dominion over behavior, we have a problem. If anxiety about stress (stressing about stress?) is the lens through which you view everything in your life, your job, your goals, your aspirations, your interpersonal relationships, your capacity to achieve will be significantly diminished. If this characterizes the life of too many people, we have a big problem.
Accommodation is apparently our society’s response to people marinating in self-diagnosed stress and it’s not good. It starts when we come out of the egg. Participation trophies in little league, eliminating dodge ball because there were winners and losers, dismantling gifted programs, shuttering high performance schools (such as in New York City), pass/fail everything, dumbed down curricula to ensure that everyone feels good about themselves, regardless of whether they can read and write. This is happening throughout the educational establishment, in elementary school, in high schools and in graduate schools. Sometimes the ask is just for more time, but sometimes it’s for shorter and easier tests. Sometimes the ask is for flexible timing, quiet spaces, the right to be accompanied by emotional support animal. (We actually are allowing accommodation on the MCATs and bar admission tests, gatekeeping for notoriously stressful professions. If the tests are too stressful, what about the jobs you’re trying to get? Dying patients and pissed off clients, generally speaking, are disinclined to accommodate a doctor’s or lawyer’s professional stress.)
As writer Rose Horowitch observed in a recent article in The Atlantic called “The Accommodation Nation,” everyone who is anyone (and particularly those who are the product of the loins of the 1%) expects accommodation in higher education these days. Up to 50% of students in some highly prestigious universities demand and get need extra time to take a test because taking tests makes them nervous. (It used to make me nervous, too.)
The trouble, of course, with accommodation in education is that in the real world you can’t guarantee you’ll have extra time to take life’s exams. Oh, I understand that corporate America has been seduced into embracing the notion that, for many, accommodation is necessary to achieve fairness, however please note that such corporate accommodation burns off rather quickly if you actually expect to get promoted.
Avoidance of stress manifests in many ways. First, diminished educational achievement and diminished breadth of education itself as we dumb down the whole educational process. Second, it validates a decision not to work terribly hard. Let’s face it, work can be very satisfying, but it’s also…work, in other words, it can be hard. I remember the pain of all-nighters to get a deal done. Ugh! No way was that fun, but needed and it was ultimately satisfying. Finally, it manifests itself in an unwillingness to undertake tasks that involve perceived risk.
Deadlines are a reality in business and frankly, is true of interpersonal relationships. (Will You Marry Me, Bill? by the Fifth Dimension…an obscure historical reference, perhaps?). Business and personal counterparties can be wildly unreasonable, but largely can’t be avoided if you plan to accomplish…anything.
Making decisions is stressful. We need to make them every day. I totally understand that emails and messaging have obliterated time to reflect and made our stress worse, but that’s apparently progress. Get used to it. Is it A or B? Generally, you cannot get away with “on the one hand A and on the other hand B”. I understand that if you can avoid actually answering the question, you might feel better than if you essayed an answer and got it wrong. The price of putting a stake in the ground is too high. After all, if you can evade a direct answer, you might have gotten it right. (a quantum mechanics wave/particle duality type thing). Schrödinger’s Cat indeterminacy is alluring, isn’t it?
Stress has gotten a bad name and it shouldn’t. Stress is baked into our biology and drives our fight or flight instinct. Let’s face it, life requires more than a modicum of fight and flight, day in and day out.
If you start every day wondering how you will manage and reduce your stress today, I’m not sure how much you will get done. We need to address this and soon. This fascination with stress is itself a pathology. Stress is real and it must be managed, but one should not run away from it. When stress is paramount, then the satisfaction of doing a good job, achieving and being goal-oriented must be subordinated. Comfort with lassitude, an unwillingness to intellectually die on a hill, means you will achieve little. In the real world, life rarely gives us a time out for milk, cookies and puppy-hugging.
Stress can focus the mind most wonderfully as Mr. Johnson said in a different context. Embrace the fact that life will cause stress. Understand that it is not a design flaw of life, it is a design feature. Manage it to the best you can, sure, that’s fine but don’t let it diminish you. And don’t make it the axis around which your life revolves.
Risk taking is essential for entrepreneurship, it’s essential for innovation, it’s essential to having positive interpersonal relationships. When we subordinate everything to stress avoidance, when we make peace and tranquility a predicate condition, we won’t get much done.
What to do? Can the pendulum swing back? I hope so. It is critical. Accommodation in all its forms has to be constrained in a very narrow and unambiguous track. We need to bring back the culture of winners and losers; we all sometimes lose. We need to rebuild a culture of resilience. Losing is part of life and should be viewed as instructive. Taking risk must be celebrated. Standards must be created and maintained. Working hard must also be celebrated. Sure, we can help folks overcome stress and anxiety, but it cannot become the axis around which our world revolves. All this energy around the avoidance of stress, around accommodation, around not confronting folks with jobs that are too big and hard, is stressing me out.