Stress, we are told,
is one of man’s most implacable enemies. Stress causes headaches, back problems,
divorce. What’s worse, stress kills. We are told that, to protect ourselves from
stress, we must relax. But our concept of stress is a fallacy, based on a
persistent misreading of the medical evidence.
Very few of the
studies on so-called stress have dealt with achievement or work. They have
centered in most cases on social loss: men who’ve recently lost their wives,
people who’ve lost their jobs, and folks who've been recently divorced. Sure
enough, those who've been sundered from a spouse by death or separation, or
those who've been cut off from the vocation that gave their life meaning have
suffered a plethora of physical problems. But those problems have not been due
to what laypeople call stress. They have not been the product of hard work or
the pursuit of excellence. They've been the result of three factors.
Isolation: Each of us
is sewn by invisible threads into the super-organism that is humanity. We are
cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are
severed we begin to shrivel and die.
Lack of control: Hard
work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom been demonstrated to hurt us, but
we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control. And without striving to
achieve, we cannot control our lives.
Hierarchy: Position
in the pecking order makes an additional contribution to many of the symptoms we
blame on stress. With our dream of eliminating competition, we try to wish the
pecking order away. But the fact is that we will continue to live in pecking
order structures whether we like it or not.
Social hierarchies
are not limited to "capitalist" or "consumer" societies. Not only do they exist
among apes, birds, lizards, and lobsters, but pecking orders left their marks in
the remains of our Ice Age ancestors, who thrived fifteen thousand years before
the birth of agriculture and nearly twenty-five thousand years before the
founding of modern industry. In the
Ukraine, archaeologists have unearthed
Paleolithic palaces of the wealthy—tents with a framework of mammoth skulls and
tusks, and a rich covering of fur. The researchers have also dug up the much
more modest hovels in which the poor were sheltered.
The brutal fact is
that the more we opt out of competition, the lower our position is likely to be.
That holds true in our lives as individuals, and it holds even more true in our
life as a nation. As the popular expression puts it, "If you snooze, you lose."
Many of the dire
consequences supposedly beaten into our lives by stress are the product of
pecking order slippage, otherwise known as defeat. Studies show that one of the
greatest causes of high blood pressure in humans, for example, is low position
in a social order. Raise a human's status, and you reduce his hypertension.
Primatologist Robert Sapolsky of
Stanford University studied the level of
glucocorticoids—stress hormones -among baboons in Kenya's Massai Game Preserve.
He discovered that
the hormone level was low in males who had a high social position, but stress
hormones were alarmingly high in males who were low in the pecking order. The
bottom-ranking males stooped when they walked, had bedraggled fur, showed signs
of emotional misery, and were in abysmal health. These baboon lackeys were
suffering from a pecking order slump like the one that is overtaking
America.
Stress is not a
product of the desire to achieve the extraordinary. From 1979 to 1982,
researchers at the
University of Chicago attempted to discover the differences between
high-pressure executives who be-come sick and those who do not. The low-illness
executives turned out to be strong in three areas: commitment, control, and
challenge. In other words, humans need to vigorously pursue goals, to wrestle
with problems, and to master them. They need much of what has been popularly
interpreted as stress. No wonder Dr. Hans Selye, the pioneering scientist who
almost single-handedly put stress on the map, says, "Stress is not something to
be avoided. . . . Complete freedom from stress is death. "
Excessive relaxation
is a slow form of suicide. Take the most primitive, physical level. If you fail
to use your organs, your body begins to dispose of them. The phenomenon shows up
clearly among women who don't exercise. Internal mechanisms slow the deposit of
fresh calcium in the skeletal structure. The result is that women who haven't
made demands on their skeletal frame begin to lose it. In their sixties, these
women actually begin to shrink. Unused muscles also atrophy and shrivel away.
The consequences of
inactivity are worst for infants. When babies—be they chimps, mice, or humans—do
not receive sufficient sensory stimulation, their neural circuitry fails to
develop. Their brains should be thickly meshed with nerve cells—microscopically
resembling a densely tangled underbrush. Instead, some cerebral areas in the
creatures without sensory exercise look more like a desert punctuated only
occasionally by the straggle of a plant.
But infants and
adults can actually increase the density of connections in their cerebral
tissue, adding as many as two thousand new synapses per neuron, by mastering new
experiences, and seeing and doing new things. To both body and brain, taking it
easy is death; vigorous activity, on the other hand, is life itself.
The author of
Ecclesiastes showed just how painful the deprivation of anything stimulating can
be. The man who penned these biblical passages was apparently one of the most
wealthy and powerful in
Jerusalem. He had reached the pinnacle of society and had achieved what should
have been a delicious leisure, but suddenly, all life bored him. Now that there
were no new obstacles to overcome, there was nothing new, he sighed, under the
sun.
The ennui that struck
the writer of Ecclesiastes can erode and defeat entire civilizations. It is
doing that to ours. In 1921, British author G. K. Chesterton traveled the
United States by train. He noted
that Americans were obsessed with discussing their work while Englishmen talked
only about their leisure. That may be one reason America was thriving while
England was on the wane. Today, thanks to the popular misunderstanding of
stress, it is we who chatter for hours about sports, fishing, or meditation. It
is we who are slipping.
The Japanese know
what we have forgotten: that work and challenge are the keys to a vigorous life.
They have kept alive the essence of two American buzzwords that disappeared from
our vocabulary in the early sixties: American ingenuity and American
workmanship. The Japanese out-study and out-work us.
Midlevel Japanese
executives start the business day at
nine A.M. and are frequently still at
their desks by eight at night, usually putting in six days a week. Many of them
even volunteer to work straight through their annual vacations. Contrary to a
spate of news stories about "working to death" that appeared in the newspapers
of Tokyo and the U.S. in 1993, the "salary man's" dedication seldom maims him
with "stress." Far from it. The Japanese spend a staggering 66 percent less on
medical care per unit of population than Americans do, yet they consistently
outlive us!
Like the Japanese, we
have to restore our sense that stimulation can be exhilarating. We have to
realize that challenge is not our enemy but our salvation and that the dangers
we have interpreted as stress come from something far different than what we've
imagined. They do not spring from ambition or the drive of the dedicated. They
come from isolation, separation from the social beast, removal from the super-organismic
unit that gives our life its meaning.
Our pains do not
proceed from over-activity but from the loss of control and the feeling that we
are allowing ourselves to be shuffled from the pecking order's peak. The
solution to our problem is not a good vacation. Our hope and our pleasure lie in
rolling up our sleeves and going to work.
with thanks to “The
Lucifer Principle” by Howard Bloom
