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the war on stress

Put us into cars and we become particularly caustic. The guy
who cuts you off in traffic stresses you. When you honk your horn
at the offender, you stress the driver next to you.

Holidays, with their own sets of stressors, compound the high-
way insanity. “Driving probably will become even wilder now that
Christmas (in P. G. Wodehouse’s words) has us by the throat,”
George Will noted in a call for civility in the Washington Post.
“Holidays and homicide go together like eggnog and nutmeg, so
’tis the season to study the wildness in the streets.”

Relationship—or lack of relationship—inherently causes
stress. Divorce is stressful (91 on the scale), but so are marriage
(85), marital reconciliation (57), remarriage (worth 89 big ones on
Witkin’s revised scale), and—are you ready for this?—something
Witkin calls “singlehood” (77).

Son or daughter leaves home and you get 41 nicks to the paren-
tal psyche. But according to Witkin, you get 61 points if your little
darling moves back in.

You can’t win. Enter into a relationship with another human
being, get out of one, or avoid a relationship all together—you open
yourself to increased stress no matter what you do or don’t do.

List a few of the everyday things that people do to bother you,
things like:

• cutting you off in traffic,
• emptying their car ashtrays in the parking lot,
• butting in line at the market,
• trying to buy more than twelve items in the twelve-items-or-

fewer line,
• talking loudly during the movie,
• chewing with their mouths open,
• and on and on.

Petty stuff? Probably. But still annoying and stressful—
and unavoidable.

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