{"id":55784,"date":"2022-05-23T07:26:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-23T12:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stress.org\/?p=55784"},"modified":"2024-04-06T06:27:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-06T06:27:51","slug":"an-excerpt-from-beware-false-tigers","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.stress.org\/news\/an-excerpt-from-beware-false-tigers\/","title":{"rendered":"An excerpt from Beware False Tigers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

*This is an article from the Spring 2022 issue of\u00a0<\/em>Contentment Magazine<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join us for a Free Live Webinar<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Beware False Tigers Webinar Series<\/h2>\n

Session\u00a0 #3 of 4<\/h2>\n

July 20th at 2:00 PM EST<\/h2>\n

by Frank Forencich, DAIS<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Frank Forencich, DAIS<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Living here in the modern world, you\u2019re no doubt familiar with stress and all the frustrations that go with it. You\u2019re comfortable with the word itself, and you might even suppose that it\u2019s a regular feature of human life. Isn\u2019t it normal for people to feel chronically pressured, anxious, harried, and overloaded? Isn\u2019t this the human condition?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Actually, it\u2019s not.<\/span>\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Historically, humans have always experienced adversity. But as for all animals living in a wild habitat, most of that adversity was occasional and episodic. There were hard times and even life-threatening emergencies, but those challenges usually passed and gave way to a more comfortable, familiar pace of life.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, the word stress didn\u2019t really enter into popular use until the early twentieth century, beginning with the work of Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and his description of the \u201cfight-flight\u201d response. Years later, the pioneering endocrinologist Hans Selye, sometimes called \u201cthe grandfather of stress,\u201d observed that patients with various chronic illnesses appeared to display a common set of symptoms. He also noticed that laboratory animals exposed to cold, drugs, or surgical injury exhibited a typical pattern of responses, a \u201cgeneral adaptation syndrome.\u201d Later in the century, books such as\u00a0<\/span>Why Zebras Don\u2019t Get Ulcers<\/span><\/i>\u00a0by Robert Sapolsky and\u00a0<\/span>Full Catastrophe Living<\/span><\/i>\u00a0by Jon Kabat-Zinn brought stress into popular conversation and awareness.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And today, everyone\u2019s talking about it. Google\u2019s Ngram Viewer, an online tool that tracks the frequency of words that appear in print, shows that the word\u00a0<\/span>stress<\/span><\/i>\u00a0barely made an appearance in the nineteenth century, then rose gradually throughout the twentieth. And now it\u2019s everywhere. Even before the social justice protests and COVID-19 pandemic of 2000, almost everyone was claiming to be \u201cunder stress\u201d in one way or another, and even children were claiming that their schoolwork was \u201cstressing us out.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We all feel it now: this maddening sense of urgency, the impending loss of control, the pervasive cognitive overload, the squeeze of temporal poverty and economic uncertainty. Stress has become a ubiquitous, chronic, and even debilitating feature of the modern world. We often joke about it and sometimes even brag about it, but this is serious, even lethal business on a vast scale. Not only does stress wreck our bodies, it also has extremely negative consequences for cognition and imagination and, in turn, our ability to create a viable future.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Planet of Stress<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1996, the World Health Organization declared stress a \u201cworldwide epidemic,\u201d and if it was bad then, it\u2019s a thousand times worse now. Global pandemics, widespread economic insecurity, social injustice and racism, political polarization, overwork, lifestyle disease, food and water insecurity, political corruption, misinformation, health care disparities, and looming above it all, the impending collapse of the biosphere. It\u2019s no wonder that the World Health Organization numbers look as bad as they do:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n