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The Age (Melbourne) , April 29, 2002 Monday
Stress has done a Zeta-Jones. Determined to escape obscurity on the set of a British country bumpkin soap, Catherine packed her bags and headed for Hollywood. Inspired, no doubt, by Tracey Ullman, Gary Oldman and the hoards of fame-seeking Brits who'd trodden the path before her. She got lucky. She landed a role in Zorro - the American casters confusing her dark, Welsh looks for Spanish. She caught the eye of Michael Douglas. Wooed and schmoozed. Lived happily ever after. Stress had a similar turn of fortune. Once an unknown, it's now as ubiquitous as Celtic Cath. With the same star quality. Being "stressed" makes one worthwhile, an upstanding member of society. Stress is the personality accessory no self-respecting Western-worlder dares to be without. Tracking its transformation, however, reveals us to be as fickle as the Hollywood A-listers. To ensure that stress keeps coming to the party, we've cheapened it, overexposed it. Now, it's on the verge of losing all meaning completely. In 14th-century Europe, stress described social and economic adversity. It was the preserve of the poor: a state of hand-to-mouth existence that only money and class could avoid. In 18th-century Germany, it described a state of mind. "Storm and stress" were part of the romantic literary movement where impulse, urge and passion were poured out page after page, by the likes of Goethe and Schiller. Stress was synonymous with positive emotional intensity. Until, that is, you grew out of it. It wasn't until the late 19th century that medicine explored its use and abuse as a human survival response. "Fight or flight" was the theory behind it. Faced with danger, our bodies react. The adrenalin pumps. Our hairs stand on end. Our hearts beat faster. We prepare to attack or save ourselves, by escape. The problem is that we rarely fight or take flight. Usually we sit, with nothing more than an army of paperclips and mangled staples to command. Like deserted generals, we possess few armaments to throw at the enemy: the dirty look, the sarcastic quip, the bitten fingernail. Most often we internalise it. Turning every modern malaise into a potential heart attack. Divorce, death, distress and disappointment are all labelled and listed for easy selection and self-diagnosis in the plethora of stress management self-help guides. "We've trivialised it," says Brook Ramage, the managing director of the Golden Door health retreat in Queensland. "I wish people would say 'pressure' more. There's a big difference between saying 'I'm under pressure' and 'I'm suffering from stress'. Pressure is OK. But stress is a combination of 1500 physical and physiological responses from a raised heart beat to impaired blood flow and shallow breathing." There's no doubt that stress - in the physiological sense - is to be taken seriously. In health terms, it can lead to depression and heart trouble, having the nasty habit, like a schoolyard bully, of exploiting one's physical and psychological weaknesses. In crude economic terms, stress costs us millions. In the United States, doctors advise that every dollar spent on stress management yields three dollars in improved productivity. Here, the taxman has ruled stress management courses tax deductible - preferring to sacrifice government income sooner than pay out hefty workers' compensation claims for stress-related depression and heart disease later. But stress is a personal thing. One executive's stress is another's challenge. As the word has been adopted, nurtured and groomed, it has come to punctuate our parlance under circumstances that have nothing to do with health and everything to do with status. Not being stressed means you're not good enough, not working hard enough, or at a high enough level to understand what it means. "Executive stress" has an aspirational ring: a status and standing only "executives" attain. Generalising the term makes it more democratic, steals it back from the vocabulary of business and commerce. It describes a widow's grief, a low-paid worker's dissatisfaction, a student's exam nerves. "Stress" is in bed, at work, on the tram and on holiday. It's inescapable. Like advertising hoardings, it's wherever you look. The more we mention it, the less it means. Like any word repeated too often, it sounds hollow, meaningless.
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Copyright © 2002 Macquarie Institute, Australia
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