As part of practicing at least some semblance of decent health (and mental health) maintenance, I read quite a few medical papers about some of the "conditions" I live with.
I have never had the good fortune to be "perfectly healthy" — that I'm aware of — but I also don't live in a state of decrepitude.
I have a dodgy back because I am quite tall and spent a number of years playing semi-professional golf, and subsequently did quite a bit of heavy lifting during my latter 20's and almost to my mid-40s. I probably didn't take as good care of my long back as I could have... and I have felt that more in later life.
I inherited a family tendency towards hypertension (elevated blood pressure) and Restless Leg Syndrome. The latter might not sound like much of anything, but it can be plenty irritating.
And, of course, I deal with ADHD as best I can, and have a late-life diagnosis as being on the high-functioning end of the Autism Spectrum.
I don't really care about the medical buzzwords, nor about identifying with my conditions... I just want to understand them as best I can and then live as healthily I can without throwing a bunch of pharmaceuticals at the issues.
Anyway, with this long-winded intro out of the way, I repeatedly am reading that one of the best things we can do for our health is "reduce stress."
Perhaps that is a fair assessment, but how the heck do you "reduce stress" in this crazy world of ours? For many people, "stress reduction" is a luxury we simply can't afford, mostly because it involves a reallocation of our time to things like sleep, meditation, exercise and the like.
How do you reduce stress when your life revolves around the cost of basic survival? How do you reduce stress when you live with the knowledge that if you get even slightly ill or break something, the cost of being put back together will likely make you homeless?
The overall lifestyle in the US of A is just not very healthy... and much of that is about stress. Small wonder life expectancy in this country has actually declined since 2014, while it has gone up in virtually all other industrialized nations.
To be honest, I would love to reduce the stress in my life! However I am not sure how entirely I would do that, other than maybe laying down and dying!
Yes, I know, that's not really funny.
With the fundamental framework for living being so heavily centered around so-called "grind culture," how can we be expected to dial down stress?
From where I am sitting, the ostensible "cure" looks like it would merely trade one kind of stress for another... hardly ideal.
Sometimes it strikes me that we need to completely "rewrite" how we live our lives, at the societal level, rebalancing "what it takes" to live a pretty basic and normal life... so it isn't so insanely stressful!
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2026.04.30 01:12 PST
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