The Truth about Stress was a brisk hour of rudimentary fact-finding – review
The word “stress” has become an umbrella term for a spectrum of contemporary anxieties from bog-standard rage to serious depression. Only this week, the footballer Aaron Lennon was detained under the Mental Health Act for a “stress-related illness”. So what exactly is stress? Could The Truth about Stress (BBC One) live up to its title?
In a brisk hour of rudimentary fact-finding, Fiona Phillips looked for symptoms before moving on to potential palliatives. Stress, she found, can have any number of root causes. Traffic jams. Rapid-fire maths tests. Proximity of tarantulas. Or in Phillips’s case, getting up at 3.30am to present breakfast TV while looking after small children and two parents with dementia.
These pop science programmes are remarkable for how many boffins they unearth. There’s a professor for everything these days, including academics who have devised all sorts of experiments to test their pet theories on the subject. One argued that symptoms of anxiety are adjacent to symptoms of excitement. His proposed solution for anyone feeling anxious was simply to tell yourself you’re excited. It works for karaoke. It may have less of an abracadabra impact on your groaning in-tray at work.
Another discoursed on something called brown fat, allegedly good blubber which keeps you warm in cold water. He didn’t explain how it works in traffic jams. Yet another professor did a food experiment with football fans. Those whose team had just lost got less of a hit out of sugary buns than the winning fans.
Most of these professors provided physiological data to underpin what we already instinctively know. Everyday stress, you may be less than staggered to discover, is best dealt with through improvements in diet and exercise regime. This was shown by hooking three human guinea pigs up to stress-testing body-rigs for several weeks and feeding them turbo-fruits and mindfulness nuts.
Ah yes, that’s the other solution. Mindfulness, the on-trend practice of zoning out things over which you have no control, has “strong scientific credentials” apparently. Phillips didn’t manage to dredge up a professor of mindfulness. But give it time. The very thought is slightly stressful.
