Stress

Excess stress not only takes a physical toll on the body but it degrade society as well.

Why are we all so stressed?

In my last blog, I mentioned how our thoughts sometimes control our emotions, while other times our emotions provide the biochemical substrate for our thoughts to grow out of. I got an unwanted lesson in this process the last few days, as I been sick. I found myself quite cranky after a few days not leaving my bed. Such a short time of not engaging my sensory nervous system made going back to my everyday life quite shocking. Sounds were too loud, smells became insulting. I would be lying, if I said the thoughts that swam through my mind were happy little fishies. Nope. During this time I had sneaky alligators and blood-seeking sharks patrolling my consciousness. In my darker depths, there were those giant squids that feed upon prehistoric aircraft carriers waiting to drag me down at my first moment of weakness.

All the thoughts that haunted me brought me back to real moments in my life that I colored in with darker emotions. I do not wish to forget these moments, nor do I which to erase the dark stain I put on them. Part of life is learning to navigate the treacherous, having faith that pain will pass. Unpleasant memories are a reminder of this truism. Learning to relive difficult moments to see them from a different perspective is where growth comes from.

But, during this time, these carnivorous thoughts weren’t infesting my mind because of any real-world situations that had to be dealt with. These thoughts were swarming my head because my body was compromised. My bones ache from laying on them too much. My blood felt congealed from not moving. In short, my brain was reliving past pain to match the present pain my body was going through. Just as my brain can fashion a mental paradise for itself after a day or two of camping, it can also create its own hell after a few days of being cooped up in a room. Neither of these versions of me is more real than the other but I know which one I want to produce more of.  

I don’t want this to sound more dramatic than it is. I got the flu and was laid up a few days, but I do want to use my experience to make a point. I began this post by asking why are we so stressed. There plenty in the world to find fault with. We should be able to constructively criticize social problems in order to ease them. I do question whether holding onto our fear and anxiety help with this process. Is approaching these collective problems with excess stress, detrimental to our ability to effect any positive change?

Despite external stressors being real, how much of our stress is caused by them? How much of our stress comes from our body being deprived of basic needs such as movement, touch, and sun? In an age where we all have so much ability to communicate and miscommunicate with each other the distinction between internal and external stress is important to understand. How much road rage is the result of someone in front of us taking too much time to acknowledge a green light vs us being confined in a combustible powered movable cage? How many angry online comments are the expressions of people who were on ill-fitting chairs staring off into a stream of blue light for who knows how many hours?   

Which brings me to the larger point. We live in a culture that is marked by many expressions of pain. So much of this pain see to me to be originating from deep personal discomfort despite what the topic of rage happens to be. It is so easy to get caught up an argument with someone we may not know online about something we would not have even thought about before we turned on our screen of choice. It's so easy to get into arguments with people we know and love in the same way. There nothing wrong with disagreement. We need diverse perspectives to keep our ideas from becoming inbred. It is healthy to mentally spar with each other, but is this what's happening most of the time we are in conflicts? It's easy to lose track of our bodies as we spend more time online. How much of the media content we create is the expression of happy bodies verse deficient bodies? Again neither expression is any more real than the other, but they do have a very different influence on the world. This is not saying we should airbrush our avatars or avoid confrontation, but rather we should be mindful of how our physical condition is affecting how we are interacting with one another.

We live in a remarkable slice of history. The internet was injected into our reality for good and ill. Perhaps our generation's only purpose in all of this is to make mistakes; to see what works and what does not work in regards to communicating online, so future generations can learn from our innocence. Perhaps though we are tasked with laying a functional communicative foundation around the globe so future generations can ascend to never before reached cultural peaks. Both stories again are equally true, but they are quite different. This is our choice.

Anthony Bruni