When did “stress” become the public enemy of health and creativity? It’s an interesting question, now that doctors attribute medical ailments to “stress,” corporations hold stress-management seminars, and friends talking about problems are told to just not “stress out,” because “stress” itself is their problem. In fact, stress-management is the product sold by several billion-dollar industries.
Author Angela Patmore tells Ode Magazine, “A lot of stress management is tranquilizing people, giving relaxation therapies and massages. I believe that’s harmful, because instead of empowering people, it slows them down…. We’re creating a society of people who are afraid of working. Besides, all this talk about stress doesn’t solve underlying workplace problems. It distracts attention from an organization that is run poorly, for instance.”
She writes in the Guardian, “Arousal and emotions have been turned into syndromes, and an industry with more members than our armed forces drip-feeds us alarmist medicalising twaddle known as ‘stress awareness’ about our brains and bodies, the effect of which is to warn us, ‘Let us calm you down or you will die.'”
We should seek resolution, not relaxation, she says, in a philosophical, psychological, and historical critique of that one word that has come to stand for so much.
