There's a fascinating article in the August issue of Wired about this very Old Testament-looking scientist named Robert Sapolsky who is working on a vaccine-like treatment for stress. It seems he hung out with baboons for a while and figured out that social rank causes stress, and stress causes physical problems. The less rank you have, the skinnier and sicker you are. Or fatter and sicker, if you're a human. Whatever. Low social rank = physical problems caused by emotional stress.
Michael Marmot of University College London has been studying British civil servants in the Whitehall study for the past 25 years. From the article:
"The differences are dramatic. After tracking thousands of civil servants for decades, Marmot was able to demonstrate that between the ages of 40 and 64, workers at the bottom of the hierarchy had a mortality rate four times higher than that of people at the top. Even after accounting for genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking, civil servants at the bottom of the pecking order still had nearly double the mortality rate of those at the top."
That's a little disconcerting. There's not so much you can actually do about where you fall in the pecking order at work. I mean, you can try, but, um, it's the recession.
Another quote:
We tell our kids that life isn't fair, but we fail to mention that the unfairness can be crippling, that many of us will die because of where we were born. This is the cruel trick of stress: If it were only a feeling, if there were only the despair of having no control or the anxiety of doing without, then stress would be bad enough. But the feeling is just the trigger. We are the loaded gun.
As someone who struggled with anorexia and other eating disorders for years, I can tell you the desire to exert control over your life can absolutely kill you. I'm fairly lucky it didn't kill me. The mind is a powerful thing -- way, way more powerful than we humans have been giving it credit for over centuries of medical improvements.
So what can you do if you have little control over your situation at work or wherever it is that is stressing you out? The article recommends not fighting, meditating, making friends -- the same stuff everyone tells you. I don't think that gets to the heart of the "I have no control" part of the situation.
I say embrace it. I have no control. So what? Does that make my impact on the people around me less important? Do I have nothing to contribute just because I'm not in charge? And would I really want to be in charge, really? And who's to say I won't be in charge, eventually? If there's anything I've learned in my career, it's that things can change rapidly. You just never know who will end up on the top of the dog pile.
Also: I have no control. Why hang out with anyone who's going to rub my face in that? Why hang out with someone who's constantly comparing our parenting skills, our outfits, our lawns? I'm not saying don't be friends with people who have more social rank than you, but don't be friends with toxic people. You know who I'm talking about. Everyone has a bad day. Some people have a bad day every day, and they want you to, too. I went through periods of anxiety and depression when I was that toxic person. If you are, get help. It's not just in your head -- it's in your body, too.
Even if I'm never in charge, I still have a lot of influence over my impact on other people -- whether they find me pleasant or unpleasant to be around, whether I make them laugh, whether I give something to think about when they read my blog, whether I bring calm or anxiety with me when I walk into a room. Those things I can work on. Those things I do work on. Which makes me feel less stressed.
I've found my stress to be directly connected to my perception of my own control over the situation. So, ironically, thinking about how I have no control, really, in the space/time continuum really chills me out. I feel less pressure to fix everything.
Here are some things that help me get a better sense of my own significance.
Check out these pictures by Justin Quinnell taken with a soda can and a pinhole -- they record six months of the sun's travel from solstice to solstice over someone's grave. I know, it sounds weird. It sounds totally depressing. But we do know that we all die eventually, right? Whether or not that is stressful depends on your point of view. I find them calming. I don't want to be dead yet. But eventually, I will die, and life will go on. I can't mess everything up, really, I can't.
Also, this. Sean Stiegemeyer's stop-action filming of the Icelandic volcano eruption in May. I wrote about it a while back -- the fact that the earth still decides to erupt a volcano whenever it wants to whether or not we want to fly our airplanes to Europe triggers calm in me. People, silly people. How tenuous our existence. How fortunate our existence.
Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
Finally, this. Blues Traveler's "100 Years." Nothing that stresses me out today will matter in 100 years. NOTHING. Peace out, my friends.
(Ed note: This article is one of the reasons I believe in print publishing. It's really, really long. I would never read it on a screen, except maybe the lightless screen of the Kindle or nook. But long-form articles make you think, and think and think. We need them in this world. Support long-form publishing in whatever shape it takes in the future and the talented writers who come up with sentences like the last one I quoted, which, damn, I wish I wrote.)
