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of attacking ‘stress sufferers’ rather than exposing the powerful multi-million pound industry that is deceiving them about their normal emotions and mechanisms.
    When people are constantly being told alarmist nonsense that they are going to die, and that they must avoid ‘stress’ when they don’t know exactly what it is, they become hyper-vigilant (over-alert) about their health. When they say they are ‘stressed’ or ‘stressed out’ they are really experiencing fear and anxiety:
• that they can’t cope with life’s demands
 
• that they are about to break down mentally or physically
 
• that they need to avoid arousal
 
• that they need to calm down.
    These fears and anxieties have not happened by accident. They have been deliberately engendered by the stress management industry itself spreading myths about our health and our feelings.

Popular stress myths
‘Stress is bad, pressure is good’
How come? Because stress is pressure you don’t like, and pressure is stress you do?
‘Stress causes disease’
That very much depends on what you mean by ‘stress’. If you mean fight-or-flight, the stress research itself doesn’t show that arousal causes disease. It shows that helplessness and apathy cause disease. If you mean being in a hurry or being very busy, research on anti-ageing suggests that time pressure and challenges increase the production of heatshock proteins that repair damaged cells and prolong life, a process known as hormesis. As we age this process slows down, but experts like Dr Marios Kyriazis say that seeking out challenges and rushing about ‘exercise’ the vital repair mechanism. 4
‘We work harder now’
We are apparently ‘worse off than previous generations’. Under the 1834 Poor Law there were 600 workhouses in Britain. Compared with present-day worries, such as not having time to read the 11-section Daily Telegraph, they had it tough. Up north people got up at three in the morning and clattered to work at mills in their clogs. People were ‘clemmed’ (frozen and starved) to death. Down south Daniel Defoe was in a debtors’ prison and Charles Dickens was working in a boot-blacking factory at the age of 12. Children were up chimneys and down mines. People laboured in William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’ for barely enough to buy bread and potatoes.
‘The pace of life is faster now’
Our brains can’t cope, say the stress merchants. Well, past generations also had peculiar conditions supposedly caused by the pace of life: ‘brain fag’, neurasthenia, nervous debility, ‘nerves’. A typical sufferer was Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written in 1813: ‘I am frightened out of my wits; and have such tremblings, such flutterings, all over me, such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and such beatings at heart, that I can get no rest by night or day.’
    We are not really more nervous or frenetic or hard-working now than past generations. These are all myths.
    On the other hand, stress management can kill.
    Kava kava, a herbal stress remedy, has been linked to fatalities from liver damage. Benzodiazepines, so-called ‘minor’ tranquillisers, extrapolating from Home Office statistics between 1964 and 2004, were involved in 17,000 deaths. How come? The American Medical Association explains:
All depressants have a high potential for abuse. Tolerance to depressants develops quickly and may lead to physical and/or psychological dependence. These drugs work by temporarily shutting down some areas of the central nervous system; the user who takes increasingly large doses as tolerance develops risks the central nervous system shutting down entirely. This risk becomes particularly acute when depressants are combined with alcohol, which produces a synergistic effect – a phenomenon best understood as ‘one plus one equals three.’ Because the lethal dose of depressants remains the same as tolerance increases, a person taking heavy doses