Stress : An increasing Threat
Stress is an increasing concern since it is more prevalent in our lives today than it has beenin the past due to many of our traditional avenues of dealing with stress being no longer readilyavailable to us as well as the many new stresses caused by modern life. These include theincreasing crowding of today's cities, the fact that the stresses in today's life are largely impliedand that there is no physical way to take them out as well as anticipation often being more stressful In today's increasingly urbanized world one can see that people are becoming morecrowded together, and so stimuli such as noise are amplified by the close proximity to one another.People in the city tend to be overstimulated however, and this causes them to try to block outwhatever excess they can, such as ignoring people who they see walking down the street. Theovercrowding in today's gargantuan cities has amplified the problems of substance abuse,alcoholism, crime and mental illness in comparison with areas that have the population density ofrural areas and villages. This was shown although to quite an extreme in a study performed byJohn Calhoun at the United States National Institute Of Mental Hea
Epstein, in which he found that "the veteranssuffered their highest levels of anxiety hours before the jump, while the beginners' fear becamesignificant only at the airport. This isamplified by how the human stress response has not changed despite our societies changingdramatically over the past 2 or 3 millennia. One can easily see that stress permeates every aspect of our lives. This is what enables people to balk at the thought of living withone other person, and yet for New Year's they go out and publicly party with several thousands ofother people. The negative effects of overcrowding have also been shown by a studyperformed at London's Bedford College, on a group of 220 South London women. After Calhoun had terminated the experiment hecame up with a term for the huddled mass, which he called a "behavioural sink" (OgdenTanner,46), he defined this as "any behavioural process which collects animals together inunusually great numbers". Works Cited eds. The lack of control one feels over their surroundings amplifies the tension ina given situation. Planet Under Stress: The Challenge of GlobalChange.
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