Farmhouse Breakfast Week. Chemical Sensitivity Awareness Day. National Pet Week. European Day of Parks. Food Allergy and Intolerance Week. World Telecommunications Day. Watch Your Back Week. Hug Month. Bramley Apple Week. Veggie Month. World Meteorological Day. Indoor Allergy week.
We all know such “awareness” events are lazy, desperate attempts at generating PR for various causes and commercial organisations. But there is one event that is more lazy and desperate than any other: National Stress Awareness Day.
It was last Wednesday, in case you weren’t aware. And that’s the first problem with it: if you’re stressed, you probably know it and don’t want or need to be reminded. Second problem: almost all the solutions proffered by the stress relief industry in the thousands of press releases issued on National Stress Awareness Day are vacuous.
I’ve never squeezed a stress ball and felt less stressed as a result; I’ve never played an online stress relief game, especially of the crappy ZX Spectrum kind featured on the website of the International Stress Management Association UK, and felt better as a result; and the impenetrable etiquette that surrounds the widely recommended solution of the massage — do you keep your pants on? Can you scream if it hurts? Are you allowed to fart? — makes my blood pressure rise.
Meanwhile, the advice issued by self-proclaimed stress experts each year on National Stress Awareness Day, such as the suggestion I read last week that you “declutter” your life by “saying no more often”, is invariably total balls. Saying no just leads to awkward confrontations and dismay: much better to say yes and then weedle out of the commitment by passive-aggressive means.
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As for the suggestion I read last week that we “liberate ourselves from stress” by “being honest in a loving way” ... this is the worst advice I’ve ever read on any subject anywhere. There is no better way of making life more complicated and stressful than by going around telling people what you really think of them. Hiding your true feelings, as the British have long appreciated, is the secret to a content life. However, the most problematic thing with the notion of “stress awareness” is the intellectually vapid way in which the term “stress” is bandied about.
The aforementioned International Stress Management Association UK (ISMA) website, for instance, has a section listing “Facts About Stress”, where each “fact” is no such thing. It claims, for example, that “stress is an adverse response to what an individual perceives as too much pressure”. It’s not. Stress is the mental, emotional, or physical tension that is the natural response to pressure.
If human beings didn’t on occasion feel the fight-or-flight response, they would have been wiped out as a species a long time ago. Trying to rid the world of stress is like trying to rid it of happiness or sadness or nitrogen: futile. Stress is part of the human condition and the average working day, a fact reflected in a recent study from the recruitment firm Badenoch & Clark, which found that 91 per cent of employees are stressed at work.
The ISMA website also says that it is a fact that “stress is not good for you”. And while it’s true that it’s probably not healthy if you’re throwing up at the very thought of a week of work on Sunday nights, it has been demonstrated that a bit of stress can improve performance, and mankind would not have walked on the Moon, run 100m in 9.58 seconds, broken the sound barrier, achieved anything in fact, without experiencing a degree of stress.
The most relaxed person I know, who achieves his stresslessness by smoking five spliffs a day, is also the most underachieving.
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Indeed, “stress” may be the most meaningless and misused term in the English language. When people say that they’re stressed, in my experience they usually mean something else entirely: that they’re anxious, or unhappy, or bored, or heartbroken or have too much on their plate. And too often stress is conflated with unrelated problems. Here, for instance, we have Dame Carol Black remarking at the ISMA Conference 2009 that “Stress and chronic ill health in the workplace costs £100 billion”. But stress and a chronic ill-health condition, such as, say, a bad back, are two very different things. This is like saying that £9 billion worth of bananas and hair wax are sold in Britain each year. So what? Utterly meaningless.
There were two surveys published in time for National Stress Awareness Day that made even more troubling conflations: one from the NHS watchdog saying that “stress, depression and mental health problems in the workplace are costing employers millions of pounds in lost productivity”; and another survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which reported that “poor mental health as a result of stress and conditions such as anxiety and depression” is significantly undermining “productivity across UK plc”.
The CIPD survey was particularly problematic because it transpired that the authors were worried that “a quarter of UK workers describe their mental health as moderate or poor”. But why on earth should employers be concerned if their employees have “moderate” mental health? Are we at the stage now that employers are failing if their workers are not in a state of perpetual elation? This is business, not Disneyland.
But the most worrying thing about these surveys was the way that they medicalised stress and assumed it was acceptable to class stress as a type of mental illness.
Like most people I’m pretty stressed out: I have too much work on; I’m bad at managing my time; I don’t see enough of friends; I’m not around enough for my family; I write a car column and I’ve just moved into a flat without a parking space; I’ve never watched The X Factor and have no idea what this Jedward thing is about; I’ve missed every episode of the new series of The Thick of It.
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But there’s no way I’d draw a parallel between these minor anxieties and the violent breakdowns, suicidal episodes, hearing of voices, confused thinking, restlessness, apathy, hallucinations, social withdrawal, estrangement from reality, personality changes, aggression, agitation, mania, confusion, fear, compulsions, impatience, inattention, addiction, regression, psychosis, delirium, delusions, personality changes, phobias, and isolation that are too often symptoms of serious mental illness.