Friday, April 16, 2010
Under Pressure
Fast Company: Americans are stressed. We stress about work, the economy, school, love, weight, Lost, even stress itself. Well, April happens to be National Stress Awareness Month -- and Stress Awareness Day is on the 16th. To mark the anxious occasion, here's a look at our angst in numbers.
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I was interested to see what information this article had about stress relief, since I have definitely felt a LOT of stress this year. Most interesting were the top 3 stress relievers for kids (listening to music, eating and talking to parents). I believe this data is misleading - in younger kids, I think the talking with parents is higher, while in older teenagers, the music percentage increases and talking/hanging out with friends takes the place of parents (probably at the same percentage). Nothing in this infographic is terribly useful for further understanding stress or new ways to combat it, but is still thought-provoking.
When I clicked on this link I expected something else and was happily surprised by the facts I found. Some of these facts were a bit out there, like eating dark chocolate everyday to help lower stress was done by Nestle. The "mental health days" and doctor's visits also caught my eye. It really is amazing the toll stress takes on people. It would be nice if this article linked up to ways to reduce stress, but overall it was very interesting.
Honestly, the numbers from this article didn't surprise me, but then again, I've learned a lot about mental health and stress. I have a few comments about certain stats though.
In terms of workers taking mental health days, or missing work because of stress, my friend's dad, and well known psychologist/statistician, Ronald Kessler has suggested that companies offer regular therapy to employees to counteract this. In certain cases where this has been implemented, sick days decreased drastically and workers produced better work. I'm a firm believer that, at some point in our lives, everyone should go to therapy. It's not just for people with severe mental illness. We can all benefit from some coaching in how better to deal with problems in our life. An interesting stat I heard from the head of disability services--of all the schools in CMU, CAPS sees the most school of drama students.
Another intersting tidbit about the last stat relating to curse words. There are recent scientific studies that strongly suggest that swearing actually helps people better tolerate pain. Considering that, chemically, pain and stress are very similar--both cause the release of the same chemicals (namely norepinephrine and catecholamines) and over excitation of the sympathetic nervous system--it would then make sense that swearing would help stress as well.
I also found this article interesting, although, like Katherine, I think it would have been nice to add in tips for combating stress. One thing that I'm surprised didn't make it into the article was exercise. I know many people, as well as myself, have found that exercising is a great way to burn off some of the stress we are plagued with. Although, I have also found that when you are really stressed out about something, a lot of times you are so focused on the issue that you don't have the motivation to propel yourself into action.
I think this just goes to show how much our society has changed over time. We are all under so much more pressure to be efficient and productive people which works in the short term but often causes extreme burn out resulting in loss of any work at all. I don't see any easy solution to this problem because we all still believe we are invincible until we crash. We recently learned in Joe's class about our personal jar of "I got that" and right now we all think our jars are way bigger than they are. As we come up on the last few action packed weeks of school we should all remember to take a few breaths now and then and maybe even a moment of doing nothing to recoup.
While pressure can be a detrimental force, it can also be used to help motivate. I find that unless there is some level of pressure applied to situations, there is a lack of motivation to complete the task.
However, I find it interesting the ways in which de-stressors were categorized. It did not give ways to combat the stress, but instead gave ways to understand the stress itself (as combating stress is as individual as the person experiencing the stress). In addition, I believe that some of the facts are questionable or at least prone to bias. In particular, the study done by Nestle saying that chocolate is good for you.
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