Excerpt from Dr. Shanker’s newest book Restoring Resilience
Given that we all spend so much time worrying about stress, you might well think that stress is a contemporary phenomenon, that there has never been a time when stress levels have been as high as they are now. Just this morning, I read half a dozen articles about how to cope with our unprecedented levels of stress. Which left me feeling, well, stressed.
The Victorian method of dealing with stress was self-control and, when that fails, a tonic. Relying on grit to get through until we can, if we are lucky, take a holiday by the sea. The idea here is that when you go through stressful periods in life, you just bear with it and keep going until you can take a much-needed break. But a few days after we’re back from holiday, the stress is just as acute as ever. Nothing seems to work, and many of the popular nostrums make things worse.
In 1949 Arthur Schlesinger wrote:
Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dust. (The Age of Stress, 141)
This was the period right after the Second World War, a war that claimed the lives of as many as 75 million people. Economies were left shattered and the Cold War had begun. It was a horrendously stressful period. After the war you might have imagined a massive surge of relief, but instead there was tremendous anxiety.
In 1950 the first hot war broke out in Korea, where China and the USSR supported North Korea, and the United Nations Command (headed up by the US) supported South Korea. People were frightened by the unrest that lurked in the background. People felt that there had never been an age as stressed as their own. And the stresses kept mounting.
A few decades later, the June 1983 cover of Time magazine showed the head of a young man, bursting out of a shattered concrete wall, screaming in apparent agony. The headline read: “STRESS! Seeking Cures for Modern Anxieties.” If a picture is worth a thousand words, this magazine cover certainly summed up the view of stress that people had held for quite a long time.
Stress had already become a major concern in the middle of the 19th century as this stanza is from Matthew Arnold’s 1853 poem The Scholar Gypsy illustrates:
What wears out the life of mortal men?
‘Tis that from change to change their being rolls;
‘Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls
And numb the elastic powers. . .
…this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied heart.
The poem expresses the same anxieties that we hear today. The Victorians felt that their stress was largely due to:
- demographic changes that occurred with the shift from rural life to urbanization
- technological change that came with industrialization and the steam engine
- rapid social change
- pressure to achieve social status
Victorians had a persistent preoccupation with status. The competitive exams for the civil service introduced in the middle of the century were another sign of the stress incurred by the rise of a meritocracy. The importance of social status was reflected in The Whitehall Studies (Marmot et al., 1978), a ten-year long exploration of connections between social class and disease. The study found that work related pressure is a powerful source of stress, and determinant of health.
The impetus to measure social class resulted in a revolution in universal education, with standardized examinations introduced in the middle of the century. The prevailing Victorian belief was that children should be force-fed and stuffed full of facts and knowledge, and then tested on it. A practice that too often ensured that children were just as over-stressed as their parents.
Charles Dickens’ novel Dombey and Son was a damning critique of this approach to education. The protagonist is killed by brain-forcing and another student is left mentally impaired. Long before psychology became a science, doctors would cite this novel as evidence of the dangers of overstressing a young child’s mind. By the end of the century, stress had become a British national obsession, in no small part because of the changes in educational practice and working conditions: white collared as well as blue.
