Stress: is your life a blur?

In America they call it hurry sickness. Britain caught a bad dose of it in the 1990s. As diseases go, it’s lethal: in the West, it may be the biggest killer of modern times. But it pursues its victims by stealth. You are probably suffering from it now, as you read this. What’s that itch at the back of your mind, telling you all the things you should be doing? Shouldn’t you be getting out, getting on, getting ahead?

The itch has a name — stress — and the world is suffering an epidemic of it. Work stress is increasing everywhere, says the International Labour Organization, because of competition and change. Surveys have found that a third of American workers seriously considered leaving their jobs last year because of it, and that one in four chief executives of European companies are so worried about stress that they have thought of a different career.

But you don’t leave stress behind at the office. It lurks in traffic jams, crowded tubes, and cancelled trains. It roars at you from motor bikes and heavy lorries, chatters at you through the letter box and over the phone, whines at you from children, barks at you from an irritable spouse. It is implicated, increasingly, in the two great “diseases of civilisation” — cancer and heart disease — which have risen inexorably for most of this century. Stress — defined as environmental overload on an organism — works by damaging or weakening the circulatory and immune systems. Dr Audrey Livingstone Booth, of the Stress Foundation, believes that more than half of all illness reported to GPs is stress related. Gary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, estimates that work stress alone could cost Britain up to 10 per cent of gross national product. Yet for a disease that is so costly in economic and human terms, we have taken a long time to wake up to its dangers.

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