Stress and the City - Living in NY will kill you… so will my office

The Ecology of Stress

The point here is not to make you even more tense?really. It?s about arming yourself: Understanding the causes of stress takes you halfway toward winning your personal battle against it. And when you consider the ecology of stress, New York is like a psychological experiment designed specifically to test the bounds of sanity. Take a few million type-A strivers, jam them into tiny apartments and 50-hour-a-week jobs, deprive them of grass and nature, then have them drink way too much and travel around in cramped underground tubes: That is a nearly perfect environment for overwhelming the ?allostatic system??the scientific term for the bodily processes that help us manage stressful events. Every time someone steals that cab from under your nose at rush hour or the landlord jacks your rent up higher, your body reacts. As researchers like Pickering uncover the biology and psychology of stress, they?re discovering precisely how the city gets under our skin.

In fact, just crossing New York City borders is enough to set your teeth on edge. In 1999, Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychology professor at the University of California, examined the national rates at which people die of heart attacks. In New York, he noticed, the rates are 55 percent higher than the national average. ?It stands out like a red light on the map,? he says. Then Christenfeld examined the rates of heart attacks among visitors to New York. Amazingly, those numbers were also elevated?34 percent higher than normal. The reverse was also true?when New Yorkers travel to other parts of the country, their rates drop below the city?s norm by 20 percent.

Turns out your paranoid mother was right: The city really will kill you. ?It?s incredible,? Christenfeld marvels. ?Just by visiting New York, you pick up half of the stress effect of living there. And you can shed half of it by leaving.?

[snip]

?It really just boosts your ego to brag that you live in the most stressful city,? argues Jonathan C. Smith, founding director of Chicago?s Roosevelt University Stress Institute. ?If you say, ?Well, I live in the most screwed-up city, that?s why I can?t concentrate on my kids or my spouse or my job,? ??he laughs??it?s an excuse.?

Interesting read - check it out. I wonder what my chart would look like if I were in this experiment.

This part is interesting:

Part of what makes commuting annoying is the constant noise: the squealing brakes, the incomprehensibly barking speakers. And noise, all experts agree, makes New York an absolute carnival of stress. Gary Evans, a professor of design and environmental analysis at Cornell who worked with Wener on the commuter study, recently studied an elementary school in the Bavarian region of Germany, near where an airport was being built. (It?s tricky to monitor the effects of noise in New York, because it never lets up.) Evans examined the children before and after construction, which allowed him to see how the arrival of persistent noise affected them.

Maybe that’s why I find being in Terminal A of SJC so stressful - there are constant announcements (most of them stupid), it’s right near the jet engines because Terminal A is ghetto (You board the plane via stairs, like in the old movies), and people are on the cell phone. At the opposite end was HKG which was like being in a museum!

But also my office - if my G4 Mac is on, you won’t be able to do anything because the fans are so loud!

The results were unsettling. Reading levels declined ?to a significant degree.? Why? Probably because the kids began screening out ambient noise to protect their sanity. Unfortunately, they also began screening out ambient conversation?which helps kids absorb language. What?s more, the children were more likely to give up on difficult tasks. Before the airport opened, they would attempt an insoluble puzzle?a standard experimental test?7.9 times on average before giving up; afterward, only 6.3 times. Other studies have shown that children lose six months of development for every extra ten decibels added to their learning environment, Evans notes.

Argh.