STRESSED OUT!

When was the last time you declared to anyone who would listen, “I’M STRESSED OUT!!!” If you are anything like me, it was probably sometime in the last half hour. “Stress” is my middle name.  O.K., my middle name is Margaret, but you know what I mean.

Stress, as we all know, is a pretty common complaint. But it might surprise you to know that, technically speaking, “stress” is not an illness or a diagnosis in itself. That’s according to Dana Becker, author of “One Nation under Stress” whom I heard being interviewed on NPR recently (see below.) Becker says we should be concerned about the external stressors that are causing us….well, I was about to say, “stress,” but if I understand her theory correctly, “being stressed” is merely an idea that popular culture embraced along about 1976 or so. It has taken on a life of its own as a culturally-defined concept so that we now understand it as internal stress; as an experience or a condition. So we eat kale and take yoga classes to try to calm down. There’s nothing wrong with kale and yoga, and maybe they help, I wouldn’t know, I hate kale and the last time I did yoga I thought I had reached Nirvana but it was only a Neil Sedaka song that got stuck in my head. Blissful as that may be, it wasn’t Enlightenment and I was nervous to try yoga again for fear of hearing, “It was a time when strangers were welcome here…” over and over again on my mental iPod at three in the morning.

Instead,  I believe Becker is saying that we should think about how the pressures of everyday life affect us. This means we should change our language about stress to say something like, “Stressors are causing me nervousness or agitation or anxiety or worry or distress.” Becker went on to explain that we should find ways to dispel or manage these stressors in order to mitigate the stress they cause. And really the stresses of life can be so varied, can’t they? Everything from a hangnail to your grandmother going to prison for that bank heist she pulled last year. It all depends on how we deal with them.

Confused? I certainly was, but that’s what I got out of the seven minutes that I listened to this woman talking about her book. You can check it out on www.npr.org to get your own interpretation, or you can buy the book. I would have done that, but amazon.com was slow to load that day and I got stressed, or should I say “irritated?” Anyway, I was intrigued enough to try and think through some applications of her theory in my own life. For you, I offer myself as a test case.

Let’s take something like meditation. Everybody, including doctors, psychologists, magazine editors and gurus, to name a few, recommend meditation as a way to relieve stress. Right? For me, this works exactly the opposite. I find meditation extremely stressful. I cannot escape the certainty that I am not very good at it. As soon as I sit with my hands folded peacefully in my lap, I start to get sore all over. I fidget and pretty soon I'm ready to scream. As soon as a yoga instructor says, “Take a cleansing breath,” I think, “Cleansing. Cleaning. I should be cleaning the bathroom.” As soon as the soothing voice on the relaxation tape says, “Let your legs sink heavy into the chair,” I think, “Oh, yeah, heavy! I shouldn’t have eaten that last Brownie. Now look at those thighs!” As soon as a meditation leader says, “Just watch your thoughts as they come into your head and gently remind yourself to let them go,” I get more and more agitated about all the nonsense I can dream up to think about that pretty soon I’m yelling silently, “For the Love of Pete, will you STOP THINKING ALREADY!!!!” It’s really quite exhausting.

So, with this new theory in mind, it means that it would be in my best interest to remove the stressor, i.e., meditation, and, presumably it follows that the stress, or pardon me, the anxiety about the stress, will take care of itself. This means that I can quit meditating and never worry about meditating ever again! I can almost feel the stress melting away. My legs are feeling heavy in the chair. My mind is clearing.

OOOOHHHHHMMMMMM!

Heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered” with Audie Cornish, on March 11, 2013: an interview with Dana Becker, author of “One Nation under Stress.”