![]() ![]() Don’t just renationalise public transport – nationalise wifi, too, and liberate us from router-based suffering. Require all customer service helplines to give you £10 for every minute you wait and let you choose your hold music: birdsong, Bach, death metal, or Kate Winslet saying “ Everything’s going to be amazing – you’ve got this”. Put phone chargers, public toilets and water fountains everywhere, for a start. But in terms of getting us through those stress crunch points in the day, there are so many little things that would help. ![]() Goodness knows what can be done about the big stuff while we wait for the human central nervous system to catch up with the 21st century, or for one of the smörgåsbord of potential catastrophes to return us to calm, pre-agrarian living. Women, people under 35 and on lower incomes suffered worse, unsurprisingly. We’re reporting higher levels of stress all the time: according to Ipsos research last year, 60% of participants across 34 countries report that they have felt stressed “to the point where they felt like they could not cope or deal with things at least once in the past year”. None of our fight-or-flight stuff is turning out to be particularly helpful for dealing with constant aggressive digital stimuli, the melting Antarctic, zoonotic bird flu, flesh-eating opioids, alien balloons et al. The thing is, we’re still evolutionarily maladapted to deal with the world in which we find ourselves. It’s a cruise ship buffet of cortisol and my life is laughably low-stress, so surely everyone feels like this? Maybe there wasn’t a tick box on the survey for: “It’s a constant roiling churn – please help.” After the 5.38am witching hour, I have multiple sweaty, chest-tightening peaks throughout the day. But it’s more that the real problem with stress is the relentless way it accumulates, like heavy metal in your blood the way it keeps coming back to deliver a top up. For one thing, that seems likely to be a transitory stress peak – the kind you get through by gritting your teeth (possibly trying not to crush the pipette delivering flower essences into your gullet as you do) and reminding yourself that later you’ll be able to snatch a few moments to quietly stare into space and regret your life choices. If you’re commuting, any number of exciting developments are likely to be poised to ruin your day and, if you’re Mark Wahlberg, you’re an hour and 23 minutes into your shower and have to start playing golf in seven minutes.īut I’m not convinced 7.23am is really the worst. ![]() Possibly a child will pull a dog-eared letter out of a book bag with the triumphant air of a conjurer with a rabbit, informing you they need to come in this morning dressed as Pope Pius VII and bring a scale model of the Sistine Chapel made of “widely recyclable materials only, please”. If you are a parent, you may also be upbraided for human rights violations in the fields of “breakfast”, “teeth” or “shoes”. Bad things tend to happen around then: verticality, showering and dressing for starters. The question arose because according to what I suppose we could call research (a survey commissioned by Rescue Remedy, the flower-based potion for modern malaises), 7.23am is the “most stressful” time of the day. That’s when I realise that, having been woken by the dog (erratic, ancient) sometime between 3am and 4am, none of my getting-back-to-sleep strategies are going to work and instead turn to catastrophising about the day ahead, reminding myself insomnia is probably worse than smoking, sitting down and snorting asbestos combined. I’ve been trying to work out what the most stressful moment of my day is and I think I’ve got it: 5.38am, or thereabouts. ![]()
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