Stress in Everyday Life

About the photograph

Silk is still an important part of the economy in small villages outside of Hanoi. Like many places around the world, the working conditions are terrible. Young women made up the majority of the workers in this particular factory. The machines, many of which were over one hundred years old, made an earsplitting noise, and only the most minimal ear protection was being used. Exposure to high noise levels, suffocating dust, and long hours standing over the machines makes this a difficult job, especially for young women like this one pictured, who continue to work late into their pregnancies.

Five Stress in Everyday Life

People express, experience, and manage the stresses of everyday life in many ways. Stress can be defined as the response of humans to environmental demands, also referred to as a biological 'fight or flight response.' Some stress is good: it increases alertness and performance, enabling people to adapt to the needs of a given situation. But when people are subjected to a continuing assault of stressors, they can become exhausted and sick. Social epidemiologists assert that stress is exacerbated when people experience ongoing unpredictable circumstance and a lack of control.

Stress has become a popular topic in talking about health and wellbeing among relatively well-off people in global cities, who feel economic and social pressures to perform and are exposed to the many different stimuli of the current digital age. Popular magazines and websites encourage people to test their stress levels by answering questions such as "Are you irritable?" "Do you sleep well?" and "When did you last have a good laugh?" They advise people to stop fretting, concentrate on breathing, undertake mindfulness training, and go for walks. Urban yoga studios, massage parlors, and nail spas all invite people to take time out in order to de-stress, not only in cities in the global North, but also in most cosmopolitan centers worldwide.

Expressions of stress are not new, and they are not associated only with the upwardly mobile middle classes and the well-to-do; the discourses of stress have all over the world penetrated everyday discussions of fluctuations in health, wellbeing and mood. In this chapter, we present anthropological accounts of the ways in which people live with and talk about stress in a variety of sociocultural and economic settings, and we reflect on the diverse ways that people strive to manage or cope with stress. Worldwide, cultures have ways of diagnosing and treating stress that have been handed down over generations, that have specific local meanings, and that are often effective in ways that may be illuminating for biomedical practitioners who so often rely solely on psychiatric manuals and pharmacopeia.