Today's Reading
THIS IS NOT AN INTRODUCTION
You are stressed. Aren't you? If you live in our modern world with all its madness and relentless pace, then you must be. If the title of this book got you to flip a page to read this, then you must really feel it. You did well. You acknowledged how you feel. You seem curious as to what you can do about it; being curious is the most crucial step on the path to recovery. Welcome! You're in the right place.
Yes. I did say recovery because stress, as in modern-day stress, truly is a disease. In fact, it is the most prominent disease, wearing humanity down and leading to many of the other diseases that we scramble to treat while letting their underlying cause thrive.
Unstressable is a book with a mission. We are not writing it to help you become calm regardless of what life throws at you. This is as much a book about prevention of future stress as it is about healing you from your current stresses. Alice and I have committed ourselves to creating a community that aims to help a million people every year live a life that is stress-free— #OneMillionUnstressable—a movement that we hope you will be a part of.
All of us—regardless of how easy or hard our lives may seem—face challenges every day. Whether it's a global economic crisis, an argument with a boss or loved one, or a bit of illness or hardship, we all face hardships, but our reactions differ. Some of us feel overwhelmed and stressed, even depressed, while others find a silver lining in their individual challenges.
Could reality actually be far more enlightening than what we were made to believe? Although the challenges that litter our path through life are forced upon us, could it be that feeling stressed is a choice? Could we develop skills and resources to de-stress? Could stress be prevented? The answer is a resounding 'yes'.
It's not the events of our lives that stress us. It is the way we deal with them that does.
Don't be alarmed if you're stressed. You're not alone! We're all entangled in this complicated, stressful, fast-paced modern world, expected to handle it flawlessly, without the simplest education on how to make the stressors work for us, not against us. This expectation is as silly as asking you to jump into a supercar, race it around a Formula One track in the pouring rain, win the title, and make it off the track alive without ever being taught how to drive.
SERIOUSLY EPIDEMIC
Most of us believe that the only pandemic we needed to face in our lifetimes so far was COVID-19, but this is not true. For many years now, the World Health Organization has dubbed stress as "the health epidemic of the 21st century."
Research shows that 70-90 percent of all doctors' visits in the US are reported to somehow be related to stress. According to the American Institute of Stress, one of every three Americans lives in extreme stress, 77 percent suffer physical health issues due to the stress they feel, and stress negatively impacts the mental health of 73 percent of all Americans. One in every two Americans has trouble sleeping because of stress—and those kinds of stats are surely not just a US-specific phenomenon. The global sleeping aids market was estimated at $64.29 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $101.7 billion by 2026.3
In the UK, studies showed that 74 percent of Brits are so stressed that they feel unable to cope with life; 51 percent of those also reported feeling depressed, and 61 percent reported feeling anxious. Stress has overtaken musculoskeletal problems (our aching backs from sitting at our desks too long) as the top reason for work-related absence, with 17.9 million working days lost in the UK alone to stress every year.
What is more concerning is that more than 120,000 people in the US die every year due to work-related stress, and this is despite spending more than $190 billion on treating illnesses that are associated with stress at work.
How about the rest of the world? Tokyo has been reported as the most stressed city in the world, and Greece, a place we normally associate with a relaxed lifestyle, fresh food, and sunshine, has taken the prize for the most stressed country. Though we couldn't find stats there, it is fair to expect they will be worse than the US and the UK.
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