Stress and argument

Rather interesting, though fragmentary, interview, 'One Nation Under Stress,' With To-Do Lists And Yoga For All by NPR Staff. Dana Becker has written a new book, One Nation Under Stress, in which she makes the observation that the concept is really a relatively recent construct, emerging some time after the 1970s. She appears to document this observation, i.e. this part of the argument appears to be well founded.

From this observation, she apparently then argues that, having bought into the idea that stress is real and increasing, the middle class and the therapeutic industry have then created a model by which stress is ameliorated through personal and individual action. She then advances the argument that by internalizing stress management and making it a personal responsibility, people and society allow themselves to ignore the external factors that she believes are the source of stress, oppression, poverty and violence. Here is the book's blurb which I believe comports with my summary above:

Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word "stress" in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years?

In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control-workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress.

Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

I have not read the book and only have the interview and some reviews to go on so my commentary may be off base. However, this seems to be the argument she is making, or at least it is the argument that most reviewers understand her to be making.

I came of sentient age in the 1970's and stress has always been part of the ambient conversation. It was interesting to see that the emphasis on stress actually arose during that period.

But what about the argument that stress is generated by external conditions such as poverty and oppression and violence? I am skeptical and find it surprising that someone who has just identified stress as a social construct and possibly passing whim, should then treat it as a real thing with real causation. There has a been a long known set of disconnects between individual perceptions and empirical objective realities. The two most common disconnects have to do with risk assessment and with economics.

With risk, it is well known, and has been for a long time, that people significantly over-estimate risks that are beyond their perceived control and significantly under-estimate risks over which they perceive they have control. Consequently, as an example, people tend to believe that they are at greater physical risk from terrorist acts than from falling in the shower. Numerically, it is indisputable that many more people are injured and/or die from bathroom slips and falls than from terrorist acts, but that is not what people feel or believe.

Likewise, it has long been known that we overestimate the quality of life in the past and underestimate the advantages of living in the present. We live longer, healthier, wealthier, more productive lives today than ever in the past. The environment is cleaner, in general more secure, the world is at greater peace, our personal security is greater, more people are educated to higher levels, everyone has many more physical and financial assets (even the very poorest) than in the past. On virtually every conceivable metric of human well-being, we are better off than in the past. And not just the distant past but even the recent past of ten and twenty years ago (the past five years being an anomaly in the trend).

So how on earth can we be more stressed than in the past? And how can stress be rising if violence, poverty, and oppression have declined exponentially in recent decades? Are we really willing to argue that people in the first half of the last century (cholera, polio, WWI, WWII, advent of cars and electricity, etc.) led less stressful lives than those of the first half of this century? This argument has the hallmarks of a manufactured crisis in order to justify predetermined solutions. In other words, what appears to be a real phenomenon (people have manufactured the concept of stress and now integrate it into their life stories) is being used to support a hypothesis that does not otherwise have much evidence.