The Stress of Life
Everybody has it; everybody talks about it; yet few have taken the time to find out what stress really is.
We often look back longingly to a time when we imagine that the human race had no stress, but in fact human beings have always been subjected to stress of one kind or the another. Yet with each generation, complexity and additional stress are added to our lives. The technological advances of the last hundred years, particularly the last fifty, are supposed to have made life easier, but paradoxically they have intensified the stress in our life daily existence, mainly by increasing expectations and standards of performance. No longer is it enough, for example to keep the house clean, the clothes washed and food on the table; we feel compelled to keep the house looking like a magazine advertisement, the clothes whiter than white and completely wrinkle-free and to cook food of gourmet standard. Washing machines and microwave ovens, computers and facsimile machines may have taken the labor out of work but they have also moved expectations and goals even further out of reach.
Stress is a part of our lives which, though it can be overcome cannot be avoided. Indeed, it is very often a topic of conversation: the stress of living in a recession, executive life, unemployment, retirement, exercise, family problems, pollution, the death of a relative or friend. Even schoolchildren are placed under enormous stress, caused by a host of factors such as parental expectations, fear of unemployment in the future, and peer pressure, to name a few.
