Barely a month seems to pass without a public exhortation to ‘raise awareness’ about the plight of some marginal section of society, or for some worthy cause on behalf of the vulnerable. If you find this trend tiresome, irritating or indeed stressful, then help is at hand: April has seen the arrival of Stress Awareness Month.
Bearing in mind that we are said to be undergoing a mental health crisis, with one in five 16-25 year-olds now citing poor mental health as a reason for not seeking work, the timing couldn’t be better. As a nation, we clearly aren’t coping, so some reflection and introspection is surely in order.
Stress is neither abnormal, nor is it inherently a bad thing
And help is indeed on hand. There is a whole host of guidance out there on how to reduce stress levels. Common advice includes identifying your problems and what’s been stressing you out, eating well, exercising, sticking to a routine, maintaining a regular sleep cycle, meeting your friends, having a chat.
If this advice sounds banal and obvious, that’s because it is. This owes to the fact that they are self-evident remedies to a likewise commonplace and incontrovertible truth: life itself is stressful.
Over the past few decades, there has been a gradual trend to medicalise ordinary feelings of unhappiness, loneliness and stress – emotions that every single one of us feel at some time, albeit some for a longer duration and with graver intensity than others – into ‘conditions’ or ‘diseases’. This is not to belittle those who suffer from clinical depression or acute mental illness. On the contrary, to pathologise normal emotions does a disservice to those who genuinely do suffer from conditions entirely beyond their control.
This idea that all negative emotions are ‘problems’, or that they are inherently bad for us, emerged towards the end of the 20th century. It was one consequence of a shift in Western society in which we came to understand ourselves as passive beings governed by emotions, rather than people guided by reason who weren’t doomed or trapped by circumstance. This shift was outlined by the sociologist Frank Furedi in his 2004 book Therapy Culture, a work that reads horribly relevantly today, in our time in which the language of damage, anxiety, addiction, vulnerability, fragility and, yes, stress, is more pervasive than ever.
The Covid pandemic, and more accurately, the lockdowns, are routinely held responsible for our mental health woes. The emergence of social media in the past quarter century has scarcely helped, either, what with it creating more acute feelings of disappointment and inadequacy that stem from the misperception that everyone else’s life is better than yours.
But the events of five years ago were imposed on a populace that had for decades been taught to feel fragile and vulnerable, one that had already learnt to see their emotions through the prism and language of medicine and therapy. Giving a label to one’s negative feelings, one which had a scientific ring to it, or calling it a ‘disease’ or ‘condition’, could not only add legitimacy, credibility and purpose to one’s sense of unhappiness, but also help to fend off accusations of laziness or malingering. It still serves that purpose.
Many young people today aren’t simply workshy. Many are genuinely unhappy and feel powerless. But that’s because they’ve been raised in a society that has instilled in them an ethos of passivity, that they can’t control social and economic forces exterior to them, or mental or physical conditions interior to them, ones which seemingly condemn them for life. The therapeutic language in common use today, that of ‘survival’, ‘coping’ and ‘recovering’, reinforces the belief that life is not something to be embraced, a challenge to be accepted, but an exercise in damage limitation.
This pathologisation of existence is an aberration, historically speaking. Our forefathers knew perfectly well that stress was a fact of life, something we necessarily had to deal with. The Stoics built an entire worldview on it. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer did likewise, albeit giving it a more gloomy emphasis. He thought that life fundamentally consisted of suffering, and believed it best if we all accepted this fate from the outset.
The young Friedrich Nietzsche initially agreed, but came to the opposite conclusion. Life does indeed consist of strife and struggle, Nietzsche wrote, but it behoves us to embrace adversity and overcome struggle to become freer and more vital, autonomous human beings. Hence his ideal Übermensch, the individual who dares to go over and beyond. Hence, too, his most famous saying: ‘That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.’
Stress is neither abnormal, nor is it inherently a bad thing. Stress is often good for us. It is a spur and inspiration. Without tension, pressure, hard work – or indeed, a looming deadline – nothing would ever get done.
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