“The stress that breaks the camel’s back” – A survey and study of ambient slow-stressors. 

From studies of sudden, single-event traumas we understand that stress is accumulative, and this is consistent with the common occurrence of an unpredicted increase in demand on the individual’s stress-coping system leading to illness that can seem out of proportion with the seriousness of the incident.

Historically, our studies support the notion that a person’s exposure to “smouldering” excess slow-stress will contribute in a similar way to one’s “excess stress account” to that of a sudden event – though it will, of course, take longer to reach a crisis point (this is why we call it “slow-stress”). 

To understand how various stress factors contribute to an individual’s overall stress level, so that we can predict more accurately when people are close to a “burnout”, we need to better understand ambient stressors: things that make us anxious in everyday life that often lie unresolved, and unprocessed, in our sub-conscious, affect our health adversely and reduce the amount of stress from work and home with which we can cope. 

Recent surveys we have undertaken have shown an interesting mixture of things that make us subliminally anxious and place us on a higher state of alert than we would normally be.  Stressors named most often include banality on television, isolation from a sense of community by actions done by local authorities perceived as aggressive to citizens, the belief that (other!) drivers are increasingly self-centred, uncorrected errors from financial institutions who fail to honour a relationship customers thought would contain mutual trust and private aircraft noise.

There has never been academic study of these ambient stressors – and therefore the level of ambient stress is not factored in when clinicians make judgements about their clients’ current state of anxiety.  This is an on-going programme of study.