One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea

by Dana Becker

The wear and tear of American life has been a topic of public concern ever since the mid-nineteenth century when middle-class men faced pressures to succeed in a newly industrialized society. But although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control--workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism--the stress concept focuses most of our attention on the ways individuals react to stress. Several decades ago when the stress concept began to gain popularity, it would have been inconceivable that in only a matter of decades we'd be applying it to such divergent conditions as a soldier's nighttime terrors and a manager's tense work day. In this book, Becker argues that our national infatuation with neurobiology and our immersion in the therapeutic culture have created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by boosting our coping abilities, our self-esteem or our immune systems, turning our gaze inward and obscuring our view of the social and political conditions that underlie those tensions. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nonetheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves. Analyzing and interpreting both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker follows the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an important vehicle for defining, expressing and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2012

Reviews

[Jaclyn Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is utterly fascinating, but a warning: it's dense. It can be witty and Becker clearly has opinions, but they can get lost in the muck of myriad studies and works cited. This hasn't been turned into "nonfiction lite" for a casual reading audience. That's not to say it's not a valuable book to read. It is. Fact-driven and beyond thorough, it really challenged the way I think about "stress" and my use of the phrase, "I'm stressed." It's also made me take a closer look at what I consider "stress relief." Becker challenges a lot of conventional thinking and years of commercialization of what's basically an idea. The sections about how stress is viewed differently depending on someone's economic or social conditions are particularly good.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book caught my eye as it sat on the "new" NF bookshelf of my lovely public library. Not sure if it was the starkness of the all-white cover or the empathy I felt when looking at the red, white, and blue pencil all chewed up but obviously ready to continue work as evidenced by the sharpened end. Yep, I got all the that from the cover.

This is definitely a walk away from my usual reading material, but hey, I am a smart cookie, I can handle this serious stuff too. Dana's writing style is very nice, for research geeks like me, who actually enjoy reading what I coined in grad school, "journicles" (journal articles). She has a nice sarcastic voice throughout but it isn't too snarky. She really causes you to think, and hard, about what we have come to know as stress.

Being a NF book, you should know my style, I read what I like first and then browse the rest. I instantly started with Chapter 5: The Other Mommy War: Stress and the Working Mother. Something that is near and dear to my heart. I have always been a working mom. I like my work. I like my independence. I like my dual roles. I know I couldn't be a stay-at-home mom. I would like to think that I am doing well in both roles, but I know that some days I fall short, if not flat out on my face. I helps VERY much that my current job pays as it should and that I have reduced hours and that my supervisor is a working mom herself. That all being said, do I feel like I am where I thought I'd be when I started in this occupation almost, yikes, 20 years ago? No. Have I put things on the back burner due to family life? Yes. Is this the expected norm as a working mom? Seems to be. I was actually surprised at how many educated middle class moms actually felt pressured to ditch the career all together in order to raise their children, according to the chapter.

Dana Becker is a brave and brilliant researcher. I would like to see more stuff from her! She is not afraid to quote not only works in medical publications but also what we see and hear more frequently in the media. I like that because that is what I hear mostly and what seems to form public "knowledge."

The last chapter was an excellent piece on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Dana goes through the history of war trauma, examines current trauma of our post 9/11 country, and then brings up the chronic trauma of poverty. She does a great job of not denying that people suffer from PTSD, but questions our response to so many of our problems and their effectiveness, things that have not always worked yet we keep trying.

I think it is hard, if not impossible, to comb out the differences between our genes, our environment, our life experiences, our perception of trauma, our own mental health; Dana starts wonderful thoughts that hopefully will lead to wonderful solutions that will be healing for many.

Last few sentences in book:
"It seems that Americans are taking a harder look at social conditions in our country than we have in a long time. But it's too soon to know whether the era in which we are living, this latest incarnation of the most stressful times ever, will induce us as a society to take greater resonsibility for dealing with the tensions of the twenty-first century, or whether it will yield yet more individual prescriptions for grappling with our all-American stress."

[Ezekiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is going to take at least another full read through to fully process (probably 2?).

The basic premise - that the concept of "stress" is just another tool of control in an unequal/capitalist society - is really engaging. And Becker has the citations to back it up (let's put it this way, the actual text of the book weighs in at 185 pages, the citations are approximately 50 pages on top of that, though on a second read through I will definitely pay more attention to carefully checking those out, since 50 pages of citations is only truly impressive if they are all good ones).
The last full chapter (chap. 7 is more of a chaplette) is very challenging to a lot of the established work on PTSD/trauma, and I had an initial "nope" response because of that. But over the course of the chapter she brought me around to be almost as on board for it as I am for her analysis of "stress" in relation to capitalism and sexism.

It's a seemingly short read (only 180 pages? so short!), but it's got a lot of meaty sociological analysis that can be slow going if you aren't someone who just LOVES academic/theoretical/sociological writing (I like academic writing, but I certainly don't love it, and all together goodreads tells me I've been working on this book for almost 4 months, though I can blame the library for part of that).

[Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting ideas, but I found that I felt like more time was spent debunking research that didn't necessarily contradict what Becker was trying to assert, and so became a bit of a wasted effort. Also, more than once in a book with seemingly exhaustive citations, a statement that seemed to be screaming for a superscripted number ended with a mere period.

I'm glad I read it, the idea of stress being a social construct that we are trying to solve individually is an attractive and interesting idea, that I think makes a lot of sense. The second and third chapters had fantastic things that I wanted to share with whoever was sitting next to me as I read throughout.

Some good, some bad, ends up at three stars for me. Recommended reading if you're interested in the topic.

[Bonnie M. Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who cringes every time someone tells me how "stressed" they are,I really enjoyed this book. Becker shows how our famed emphasis on the individuality segues us into being individually responsible for managing our own adjustment to the craziness that is modern life.
Favorite quote: "the stress concept helps conceal social causes of many of the risks we face and spares us the turmoil of social change by keeping us focused on personal health and health maintenance."

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book! It lays out how stress is being used by pop culture/capitalists as a bad proxy for underlying societal problems (so we talk about how stressed out we are instead of the fact that we don't have affordable child care systems supported by our govt).

[Stefanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Her point was really interesting, and now I look at stress in a new way. The book itself was rather long, and dense, but very thought provoking.