It strikes me that a complete industry has emerged that tries to tackle stress. You just have to poke around on the internet. You can manage your life through burnout coaching, complete websites are set up to persuade you to enroll in a stress management course. Not to mention essential oils that you can take to eliminate short-term stress.
Of course those tips and tricks will help certain people. But personally, I think that we will not get away with some fragmented anti-stress training or incoherent plans to combat it. Stress is turning into a huge problem. For our entire species, the homo sapiens; you and me. And as long as we do not understand that the origin of stress is not in humans, but in the modern living and working style that we have created together, we will continue to only treat the symptoms, not the causes.
Burnout and mental exhaustion is not a disease. It is a healthy response to an unhealthy lifestyle, mindset and work style.
Just as a fish cannot climb in a tree, we cannot handle our modern lifestyle. We just can’t. Yes, it is possible, but then we are dropping like flies. And while governments are diligently arguing about the ever-increasing healthcare costs, our economy pushes us to perform more and faster. Standards in education causes unnecessary stress for small children. Media provides us with an endless stream of distraction and we are being bombarded with advertising about unhealthy food full of salt , fast sugars and saturated fats.
We are not suitable for our modern lifestyle, however much we want it.
A gigantic mismatch has developed between our fundamental bio and psychological mechanisms and our contemporary lives. We have not been built to sit whole days on a chair. Because of this, our body accumulates fat and our brain suffers from the lack of natural happy chemicals. We need fresh air, exercise and non-result-oriented activities for rest and recovery of our organs and vital functions.
The problem is that we are not equipped to independently filter all the stimuli that we have to deal with. Our brain can only be alert to everything - with this, our brains "believe" that it increases our chances of survival.
In itself super sweet of our brains, but they are not capable of distinguishing between the notification sounds of your smartphone or the rustle in the bushes of a potential predator. After all, we are dealing with a brain that is not so different from when we were still wandering across the savannah as half-apes. But due to this continuous alertness, we’re wasting our cognitive abilities. Cortisol is running through our bodies and we don’t get enough sleep. And that's how sleeping pills are selling like hotcakes…
If we continue like this, we become the direct object of modern times
Nowadays, companies set up a small office that serves as a workout room, they take greasy food off the menu in the canteen or quickly organize a day course in mindfulness. In my opinion, this seems a lot like fighting a running battle.
Our modern times bring tremendous progress and benefits, but we as Homo sapiens are not capable to endure the technological progress and the work ethic in the coming years. Haven’t structures such as our economy, food industry and media originally been designed to serve us? Now it seems more the other way around, and man seems to become the direct object of our self-invented systems. In my opinion this has nothing to do with modernization, this is simply an unintelligent form of life.
The reverse approach: what do we need from our environment?
Real modernization means that we must attune our contemporary life and work style to how people function naturally. And so it is top priority that we become aware of this functioning on a large scale. Thorough, fundamental and clear. In other words: to know our biopsychological manual. And like all complicated devices, it seems very complicated until you have read the manual. We must start looking critically at ourselves in relation to our modern lifestyle. In my opinion, this is the only way to continue to function at all.
Collective & integral approach
With a team of doctors, nutrition and exercise experts and psychologists, we must prepare to jointly form a collective that provides information, implementation and guidance in what people need to live healthy, stress-free and functional. A collective that provides companies, educational institutions and governments with insights and tools to subsequently create healthy work structures. But also a collective that offers individuals thinking, living and coping styles to live healthily. Actually just providing insights in being ourselves.
And it is not that complicated. There is plentiful scientific research on how our stress and reward system functions optimally, to what extent we need social security and mental peace to function optimally. As well as research how a lot of 'lifestyle diseases' can be prevented by a simple change in the way we eat, move, think and work. We are ready to be put all of this into practice.
To be continued…