The Wit's Guide to Stress

Or, densely tense

Le Désespéré, stressed just thinking about all those accents, Gustave Courbet, 1843-45

Stress as we know it was invented in Montreal in 1936. Dr. Hans Selye, an endocrinologist at McGill University, was determined to show the effects of stress on health, and he published hundreds of articles to make his point. “Stress will have been my cathedral and I shall polish and perfect it,” he wrote, and now we all live there.

“I positively like stress, arrange to inflict it on myself, and sheer awkwardly away from anybody who tries to promise me a more soothed or relaxed existence.”
— Christopher Hitchens

Big Tobacco loved Selye’s idea of stress and spent heavily to make it a thing. Stress causes heart disease and cancer, Selye found, while smoking cigarettes helps relieve stress. And what’s more, all those anti-smoking ads are really stressing people out. Ergo, Dr. Selye testified while taking fat wads of cigarette cash, smoke if you got ’em! 

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
— William James

In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis describes the investment banking technique known as the stress interview. Job candidates would be asked to open a window that was sealed shut. “The interviewer just wanted to see whether your inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.” The bank in question was Lehman Brothers, which went on to fail its own stress tests in the financial collapse of 2008.

“What is life but a series of sharp corners, round each of which Fate lies in wait for us with a stuffed eel-skin?”
— P.G. Wodehouse

Post-traumatic stress disorder, the diagnosis first made in soldiers returning from war but now informally used by anyone remembering a nasty episode, may work better upside down. “I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder,” writes the Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein. “There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster.”

“There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
— Boris Johnson

In linguistics, the stress position means that whatever comes at the end of the sentence is deemed the most important part. Or to put it another way, the most important part of any sentence comes at the — wait for it — end. You’re on a journey toward a goal and the last bit is the pot of gold. Which is why we say the real treasure was the friends we made along the way, and not the friends we made along the way were the real treasure. Stress!

“You know how one’s thoughts can be a pack of wolves.”
— Iris Murdoch 

Speaking of friends and stress, the former make the latter much easier to handle. The researchers behind the Harvard Study of Adult Development sum up the social science it this way: “Friends diminish our perception of hardship—making us perceive adverse events as less stressful than we might otherwise see them—and even when we do experience extreme stress, friends can diminish its impact and duration.” But I prefer the phrasing of screenwriter Ben Hecht:

“Given a friend to listen, my own disasters change color. I win victories while relating them. Not only have I a friend ‘on my side’ who will believe my version of the battle—and permit me to seem a victor in my communiqués—but I have actually a victory in me. I am able to show my friend my untouched side. My secret superiority to bad events becomes stronger when I can speak it and have a friend believe in it.”

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The November Riposte Card, on the nose

When I commissioned Matthew Daley to draw November’s Riposte Card and we decided on the above quip, were we thinking of how we’d feel right now? Or were we just stating a profane but eternal truth? Either way, upgrade your subscription to paid and I’ll mail you the above work of art.

Oh, also! The handy wallet card that all my paid subscribers get has the operative quotation for the current moment:

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Quote Vote

“Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
— David Mamet

What if, instead of being overwhelmed or underwhelmed, we were just whelmed? How would that feel? Better than this, probably.

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That was issue No. 279 of Get Wit Quick, a weekly newsletter that used to cause me stress and now inevitably relieves it. I hope the feeling is mutual! Thanks for reading and supporting! I’m always keen to hear your thoughts, either in the comments below or just by hitting reply. This project grew out of my book  Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, and a tap of the ❤️ below is as good as a deep breath.