That's a Stress Response

If we understand ourselves as living in a world of unseen evils, the immune system, that largely conceptual entity devoted to protecting us from invisible threats, will inevitably take on an inflated importance and a distorted function.

But here’s the problem with modernity. We live in a time where we are surrounded by stressors. Right now, I have 56 emails in my inbox that need my attention. My body is responding to that with stress (this body of ours is also not great at knowing the difference between life-and-death stressors and the kinds of stressors that won’t kill me). My un

immediate threats with a fight or flight response, but here we are, stuck in a slow-motion catastrophe whose worst effects many of us alive now won’t feel for decades, if ever.

The people I know are talking about this, too, in their own different ways. They blame the rigours of parenting through a pandemic while still trying to work; they talk about loneliness and isolation, the way it leads them to obsess over things beyond their control; they talk, increasingly, about menopause and the way it fogs their minds. Some are

Attempting to live in a way that ignores these inconvenient truths is actually the disorder. Pre-traumatic stress condition is probably a better term. It is another constant state of anxiety quietly taking its toll on our hippocampi. It’s what Mark Cocker, in his book Our Place, describes as ‘a persistent low-level heartache, a background melanchol

“We should take a step back and look at the society we’re living in and how that is actually determining our stress levels, our fatigue levels, our despair levels,” said Elizabeth H. Bradley, president of Vassar College and co-author of the book “The American Health Care Paradox.” “That’s for everybody. Health is influenced very much by these facto