Seeking calm in a stormy sea

A few weeks back, a reference made in a pastor’s sermon piqued my interest. Just so fellow church members don’t worry that they must have dozed and missed our own pastor mentioning this subject, the pastor in this case was my daughter. She mentioned a survey that measures the stress we feel each year. Later I looked further into the subject, and I’d like to share with you a bit of what I found.

The American Psychological Association has, for the past ten years, conducted an annual “Stress in America” survey. The survey has pretty consistently found that Americans are worried mostly about either money, work, or the economy. Young or old, many of us are stressed by concerns about debt, not enough income, or emergency expenses. We worry about finding or keeping a job. Or we’re struggling with the stresses of the job we do have. We’re concerned about whether the economy will ever fully recover from the last recession, or if it will nosedive again, and if our children or our grandchildren will have rewarding employment and a good life. It has become clear that our children, in a reversal of past trends, may not live as well as we did, and this worries both us and them.

Contrary to what you might expect, though, the survey has shown, over the past decade, a slow but steady decline in the stress level Americans report. It may be because we adjust to whatever adversity we face and deal with it more confidently. Or it may be that most of us have come to expect things will improve, as they so often have, even when we’re wading through something like the Great Recession. Whatever the reason, our stress level was dropping ever so slightly.

Then, even as the economy was slowly dragging upward, the presidential election took place and the stress needle suddenly changed direction. In the months leading up to the election, more than half of Americans, regardless of political party, were worried about the election’s outcome. Then in January of this year, for the first time in the decade that the survey had been conducted, the stress level of those polled showed what was described as a statistically significant move upward.

It might be tempting to attribute this to partisan concerns, but keep in mind that the decade that had shown a steady decline in stress had included both Democratic and Republican administrations, so that doesn’t seem to account for the change. This election turned out to be more of a wild card, with both candidates drawing strong disapproval from large numbers of voters. And the winner, both during the campaign and once in office, operated in a manner well outside the norm for what the country had come to expect from either Democrats or Republicans. Uncertainty is stressful. Just as the stock market reacts nervously to it, so do we as individuals.

As I began writing this piece, news outlets and social media announced excitedly that the President had just fired the FBI director. While I have no way of measuring accurately the unrest that quickly became obvious, I imagine that the needle lurched upward. Some accepted the administration’s explanations for the firing without dispute. Others considered the reasons given to be bizarre. Some didn’t care for the director and were glad he was gone. Others didn’t care for him but found the timing of his firing, in the midst of a serious investigation he was leading, to be highly questionable. A venerable and generally respected institution found itself shaken and possibly, at least temporarily, impeded in the performance of its many duties.

How much increase in the national stress level results from all this remains to be seen. Perhaps a more important question at this point is how to deal with the stress. I did a little research on that. Most of the suggestions I found might be helpful if you are frustrated by a lack of organization in your personal life or have an in-law who annoys you. But taking time out to meditate or lying in the grass to watch the clouds, even if you don’t mind ticks, seem hardly likely to reduce your feeling of helplessness and frustration with a government that seems impervious to anything you might do to register your concerns. At this point, I’m considering trying the old childhood remedy: putting my hands over my ears and shouting loudly until someone does something.

I’ll let you know if it works.

This story was originally published May 12, 2017 at 5:31 PM with the headline "Seeking calm in a stormy sea."