Our sped-up, overstressed society.

04

A major source of stress in today's society is the constant pressure to do more, see more, learn more, buy more, read more, become more.

The young professional in a designer suit screeched to a halt at the gas pump. Apparently he was late for work. "Can you fill it up?" he yelled to the gas station attendant. "Can you fill it up NOW?"

The gas station attendant asked him to wait a minute. The young man pounded on his steering wheel, yelled that a minute wasn't fast enough, and roared back out onto the street.

Moments later he returned to the pump, after realizing he wouldn't get very far on an empty tank. As one observer said: "People are so stressed out they're crazy."

Most of us learn to cope with stress, and are not really sick (yet), but we're hovering on the edge.

"Between health and illness there are obscure, ambiguous states of unwellness," says Barbara B. Brown, a biological researcher and author of Between Health and Illness: New Notions on Stress and the Nature of Well-being. "These are new kinds of unwellness--mental, physical, and psychical kinds of unease-- formed by the pressure of a jet-propelled society."

Unfortunately, our jet-propelled society seems to be accelerating to supersonic speed. Why?

Mega-realities

Jeff Davidson, author of Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society, says we are now dealing with new "mega-realities" that have turned the old ways of living on their heads. One of these mega-realities is the population explosion, combined with the shift from a rural to an urban environment.

As an increasing number of people move to the big cities, where the jobs are, the cities get even bigger and more crowded. Rents and housing costs go up, making it harder for people to live in a neighborhood close to their work. As a result, we've become a nation of commuters.

It's not uncommon to spend two hours commuting to work and back each day. In southern California, double that. Davidson says the average American will commute 157,000 miles during his or her working life, or six times around the earth.

Another source of stress is the increasing number of choices we're confronted with when we get home from commuting. Our self-help society has programmed us to believe that if we're not out there doing something all the time, we're stagnating. There is constant pressure to do more, see more, learn more, buy more, read more, become more.

Management consultant Diane Fassel,author of Working Ourselves to Death, talked to hundreds of people in corporations, universities, churches, volunteer clubs, and families. "Everywhere I go it seems people are killing themselves with work, business, rushing, caring, and rescuing," she says.

Information age

Then there is information overload. More than 1,000 new books are published each day. The Harvard University library subscribes to more than 95,000 journals. Cable TV provides dozens of channels, and in the next few years will have hundreds more. It's impossible to keep up with all the information thrown at us, yet most of us keep trying to. Just as Alvin Toffler predicted in Future Shock, we've become slaves of too many choices.

A fourth stress factor in our lives is the rapidly changing role of technology. What did we ever do before we had fax machines? overnight delivery? electronic mail? cellular phones? Technology was supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, we're using our technology to produce even more work and to do it faster. Our labor-saving devices have become labor-creating devices. For example, years ago, the typical family did laundry once a week. Today, with automatic washers and dryers, families are doing laundry three, four, five times a week.

Working mothers

In the idealized past, the husband worked while the wife stayed home and took care of the house and kids. Today, she does all that after she comes home from work. Sixty percent of women in the United States work or are looking for work. That's 20 percent more than in 1970.

Today, less than 10 percent of all households are composed of a working husband and full-time homemaker wife. In 57 percent of all families, both parents are working full-time to make ends meet.

Since one out of every two marriages in the U.S. ends in divorce, we see an increasing number of single working mothers. One single mother works in a factory during the day, cleans office buildings at night, and delivers pizzas on weekends. "Maybe I am one of those workaholics," she says. "I don't quite know for sure. I do know I'm so tired I could cry from the weariness, and I do know I got three kids to feed and clothe."

The biggest reason more women are working is that the family wants more money. Real wages have decreased 13.8 percent during the past two decades. For the first time in the century the average workweek is getting longer rather than shorter. Also for the first time this century, most young people can't reasonably expect to do better financially than their parents.

Stagnating economy

By making us work longer and harder to earn a living, our stagnating economy has become a huge source of stress. Three quarters of Ameri- cans say their jobs cause them stress, according to a survey by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowies advertising agency.

Corporate layoffs have forced managers to squeeze the same amount of work out of fewer and fewer employees. Many organizations don't really mind cutting employees, because each additional employee means added expenses for training, office space, vacations, health insurance, and other benefits.

The most stressful work environments are those in organizations with a compulsive, relentless, driven management style. These organizations think they're saving money by encouraging employees to become workaholics. They're wrong.

Tired workers make more mistakes, spend extra time redoing mistakes, and have a higher incidence of accidents. The more technical the jobs, the more likely that workaholism manifests itself as a psychological disorder, like depression or an addiction problem. According to the National Council on Compensation Insurance, psychological problems are one of the fastest growing occupational ills since 1980. Stress now accounts for 14 percent of occupational disease--a big jump from 1980, when it was less than 5 percent.

Sometimes companies offer stress management workshops to their employees. They teach their workers about stress offer relaxation techniques, and counsel them about the importance of nutrition and exercise. The dominant message is "You are responsible for taking hold of your life and halting stress." But these workshops tend to overlook the effect of the high-pressure corporate culture in which the employees have to work.

"Stress management programs can't succeed on a long-term basis if employees feel they're trapped in a pressure cooker," says insurance lawyer Donald DeCarlo in Business and Health. "Impossible deadlines, limited resources, hard-driving bosses, unclear job roles--all can make people feel stressed out.

"When people feel overwhelmed by work and unable to manage, they're likely to feel anxious and, in turn, to file more stress claims."

Our choice

Of course, it's not entirely fair to blame technology or society or our demanding jobs for our increasing level of stress. Whether it's a conscious decision or not, each one of us chooses our own lifestyle, every day. We can choose to change our lifestyle. We can choose to slow down. We can choose to quit working for an addictive, workaholic organization. We can stop running ourselves ragged in the relentless pursuit of material possessions. We can learn to live more simply. As Davidson says: "Unless you change the way you think about your time and work now, your life won't get any better in this decade. In fact, it will get a lot worse.

Curt Dewees is a free-lance writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Deep Breathing When Stressed

When feeling stressed, practice deep abdominal breathing. Here's how:

* Sit in a comfortable position, arms at your sides, shoulders relaxed.

* Exhale as completely as you can through your mouth, with the chest and abdominal area collapsing and falling inward.

* Begin to inhale slowly through your nose, making your abdomen rise. Your chest, rib cage, and shoulders should not move at all. Only the abdomen swells as the lower lungs fill with air. In this type of breathing your stomach goes out to inhale and is sucked in to exhale.

* Practice 10-15 cycles of this breathing.

* When this feels comfortable to you, practice deep abdominal breathing as you sit, stand, and walk.

Stress Bad for Diseased Hearts

Researcher Charles Benight at Stanford University hooked people up to monitoring machines and asked them to recall anger-provoking experiences. He found that stress restricts blood flow in diseased hearts. Cutting your heart's blood supply can worsen already-existing heart problems.

In another study cardiologist Alan Yeung of Harvard Medical School asked 26 people to perform complex math problems, then measured blood flow in their arteries. Stress did not affect the arteries of healthy subjects, but in patients with atherosclerosis, arteries constricted between 20 and 28 percent of their normal size.

Yeung says plaque-free arteries can cope with stress because they secrete a relaxing factor that keeps them dilated to accommodate blood flow. Cholesterol-clogged arteries, he says, lose this response, leaving people with even mild atherosclerosis vulnerable to the effects of stress.