Start Living. Stop Stressing.

BLOG ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SUSSEX LOCAL (NOVEMBER ISSUE) www.sussexlocal.net

When asked to do an article for November, the usual things pop into your head: bonfire night (yawn) or Christmas (not yet). Stress isn’t a topic that jumps to the forefront of one’s creative imagination. However, November is the month of National Stress Awareness Day, the theme of which is ‘Start Living – Stop Stressing’.

On first hearing that theme, I wondered if a Northerner had written it. Seriously. It’s got a touch of the ‘pull yourself togethers’ about it. I’m allowed to say that; I am Northern and in general, unless you can see something physically going wrong with someone, it’s considered easily fixable through bloody-minded determination. My mother’s favourite saying as I grew up was, “Pretend you’re a pair of bathroom curtains and pull yourself together.” She said that over the phone to me once when I was ill at school and I tried to listen, I really did, but the pneumonia that was growing in my lungs eventually won out. No matter how much Northern grit you try to muster, there are some things that you can’t just get over and stress is, interestingly, becoming one of those things.

It can be a difficult thing to talk about though for all sorts of reasons. I grew up in a small village in one of the most idyllic parts of the Yorkshire Dales and stress wasn’t something that was given much truck. The same went for depression and anxiety. It simply wasn’t considered real. You went to the doctors because your leg was falling off, or because all of a sudden your heart had stopped. You didn’t go to the doctors because you were feeling a bit stressed. If you did, you certainly didn’t talk about it. And if you did talk about it, you’d be the butt of everyone’s drunken joke in the local pub for about eighteen months until the next exciting thing happened.

Thankfully though, mindsets are changing but it’s taking some time. A lot of people still don’t understand that stress is a recognized medical condition and in fact it has been for seventy years. The term ‘stress’ was first coined in a biological/psychological context way back in the 1930s. Even then it was defined as, “the failure to respond appropriately to an emotional or physical threat, whether real or imagined,” and I think it’s the idea that the ‘threat’ can legitimately be something that someone else can’t see or can’t see any logic in, that’s important. We have to be more open-minded about the reality of this condition. Just because we can’t see it, or touch it doesn’t mean it’s not horribly real for someone and that’s exactly the point of National Stress Awareness Day this year on November 3rd.

So, what is stress? When I started researching this article that was the first question I asked myself and found that it was quite hard to answer. So, I turned to any writer’s trusted research tool: Facebook. I posted a status requesting help. I asked them a) what stress is b) what makes them stressed and c) how they de-stress. It didn’t take long for a common theme to emerge: “Stress is when my actions towards a situation don’t have the desired effect” or “Stress is feeling out of control,” or “Stress is not being understood”.

Stress, it seems, according to my very sophisticated survey (sarcasm noted), seems for many to be caused by a feeling of powerlessness. We all know how that feels. No matter how organized or obsessive you are about planning time, or workloads, or kid’s schedules, or whatever it is, there is always the knowledge at the back of your mind that something, out there in the ether of inevitability, can and might always get in your way and mess it all up. Most times, it doesn’t; a lot of times it does. We have no control over this and therein lies the truth of what they discovered in the 1930s: whether it happens or not (i.e. whether the threat is real or imagined), it is there and when we consider the nature of our lifestyles today it’s no wonder we are in a constant psychological battle with those things beyond our control.

Because, we are the ‘have it all’ generation. And we do. Thanks to the iPhone, email, Facebook and lots of caffeine from Starbucks, we can manage marriages, kids, careers, social lives, holidays, kid’s clubs, yoga classes and we can find time to watch films, read books, even indulge in hobbies such as knitting (it’s uber cool now to knit by the way) or aromatherapy and run marathons for charity. It is no wonder that, when our lives are packed to the privileged-brim, there’s simply no room for things beyond our control to get in the way. If they do, our whole Noughties lifestyle comes crashing down around our shabby-chic interiors.

The reality is that stress is becoming more and more common. In 2008-2009 over 400,000 people were experiencing work-related stress in this country, and that’s only the people that went to their GPs. Worringly, if ignored, stress can easily morph into much more long-term diseases such as depression and anxiety. Reassuringly though, stress can be easily tackled once you admit defeat and drop all those balls your juggling. Whether you walk away from a stressful situation for an hour, a day, a weekend, a week or a year it will help. Invariably, the world is not going to fall apart if you simply stop and take a step back but your psychological world might if you don’t. And this is where I apologise to those lovely people at National Stress Awareness Day. I was, I admit, initially dismissive of your theme. But, at the end of the day, they’re right. Stress, thank goodness, isn’t depression or anxiety, and it is possible to ‘stop’ it before it turns into that ball of anxiety that’ll sneak in when you’re least expecting it and take up squatter’s rights in your chest. Walk away from it. Laugh in the face of it. Turn your back on it, indulge in some knitting but for goodness sake don’t let it overwhelm you.

Start living. Stop stressing.