It's not all bad news. Stress can actually protect you. It forces us
"to perform at a higher level - a vestige of the 'fight or flight' instincts that kept us alive on the prehistoric savannah. Stress produces the hormone cortisol, for example, which improves our memory and enhances immune function. And those temporary spikes in our blood pressure? They're flooding our muscles and brain with crucial oxygen."
Hurrah!
The problem comes when there's too high a level of cortisol in the body.
"Overloads of cortisol will damage your memory, hurt your immune system, and increase the size of your gut."
Oh well.
No surprises that work is the biggest component of stress. But it may not be for the reasons you think - simple over-work. It's all a matter of control, or, more to the point, lack of control. When people can control the rate at which they have to tackle their mountain of work, they are chemically calmer. So there is a hierarchy of stress:
"You get hit much harder than your boss. Sure, the high-priced lawyers and Wall Street boys may feel like they're getting killed by stress - and sometimes, if they're not in control of their work flow, they are. But they can compensate with roomy apartments, vacations to the Cayman Islands, and hot-stone massage treatments. Far worse off are people in low-paying, low-status jobs."
The bottom line?
"The biological rules of the marketplace are as Darwinian as you'd expect: Climbing the greasy pole improves your health, and slipping down hurts it."
Other links today:
+ Today is the most depressing day of the year, a scientist has shown.
"He settled on January 24 after using an elaborate formula expressing the delicate interplay of lousy weather, post-Christmas debt, time elapsed since yuletide indulgence, failed new year resolutions, motivation levels, and the desperate need to have something to look forward to."
An insurance company added to the winter blues by confirming that road rage also increases in January.
+ Army officers turn to the web for advice and support. An utterly compelling report from, again, The New Yorker.
"The sites, which are accessible to captains and lieutenants with a password, are windows onto the job of commanding soldiers and onto the unfathomable complexities of fighting urban guerrillas. Companycommand is divided into twelve areas, including Training, Warfighting, and Soldiers and Families, each of which is broken into discussion threads on everything from mortar attacks to grief counselling and dishonest sergeants. Some discussions are quite raw. Captains post comments on coping with fear, on motivating soldiers to break the taboo against killing, and on counselling suicidal soldiers. They advise each other on how to kick in doors and how to handle pregnant subordinates."
The sites are platoonleader.org and companycommand.com.
+ Measuring literacy in a world gone digital (registration required). As more and more children turn to online sources to research topics, how can we ensure they become better critical evaluators of all that digital material; become adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff?
The team behind the SAT and GRE in the US have now developed the ICT: the Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment. The ICT will test not only how students find information, but how they interpret, sort, evaluate, manipulate and repackage it from a myriad of sources.
Example questions?
"'Can you help me find a good source of products and gifts designed for left-handers?' reads a sample question from a fictitious office manager. 'I'd like someplace that offers a wide range of merchandise with product guarantees - also that has an online catalog and online ordering. Discounts would also be a plus.' Fictitious colleagues might then make suggestions via e-mail, and the test taker might also get input by instant message from people using screen names like SkyDiver, JJJunior and TVJunkie."
+ From Design Observer. Linked to simply because it's beautiful:
"Like so many things in central Paris, the Montparnasse cemetery is a mixture of logic and sensuality. Neat avenues of statuary frame a site that evokes a mesmerizing kind of timeless beauty. Inscriptions on graves offer striking typographic testimony to distinguished lives long gone, architectural biographies forever suspended in the frozen space between earth and sky. Flowers adorn nearly every grave - leggy calla lilies and leafy hydrangea and big bundles of plump tulips. Montparnasse is solemn yet quietly majestic, densely plotted but unusually open, with tall, carefully choreographed plantings punctuating the marble and limestone, the asphalt, the mausolea. If you have to spend eternity somewhere, this isn't a bad place to be: it's an urban refuge, preternaturally zoned for silence, and inviting a kind of deep, secular reflection."
No comments:
Post a Comment