white_hart | (no subject)

I haven't been on Twitter much lately; after the US election it just wasn't doing my mental health any good at all, so I took a bit of a break. I've dropped back in again a few times in the last couple of days, mostly because I clearly have too much time on my hands in a week at home with nothing to do, but partly because I remember that it used to be fun. Today, though, I've been confronted by endless retweets of someone's thread about how, in the wake of the deaths of 53-year-old George Michael and 60-year-old Carrie Fisher, we all need to reduce our stress levels so that we can live to 90 instead of dying so young. Which, well, yes, they were both much too young, but most people don't choose to be stressed and are in fact stressed by factors beyond their control; health issues (including mental health), poverty, prejudice, war, and the amount of privilege inherent in assuming that we can just "choose" not to be stressed is staggering. Plus, it's bullshit anyway. My dad's heart problems weren't cause by stress, they were caused by viral damage to the heart muscle. Probably food poisoning, to be exact. Stress may increase vulnerability to some infections, but I'm not sure food poisoning is one of them. One of the most laid-back people I know died last year of acute pancreatitis, at the age of 45. (As Facebook has helpfully reminded me, today would have been his 47th birthday.) A colleague's wife died at 40 of metastatized melanoma, which is caused by UV damage, not stress. I may not be a doctor, but I'm still fairly sure more sleep - even if that's possible for you - is probably not actually going to make you live longer. And anyway, what's so great about living to 90?

Maybe my New Year's resolution should be to delete my Twitter account. I'm not sure it's ever going to go back to being fun like it used to be.

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The person in question seems to sell some kind of not-entirely-medical woo.

I know that stress isn't doing my immune system much good, and I have the eight-weeks-and-counting cough to prove it, but I think that removing the benefits cap and providing free childcare for single parents would do a lot more for me than looking at a candle and chanting.

Quite. And most of the bad stress in my life is caused by depression and anxiety, and those don't magically go away because I decide to do a bit of deep breathing and go to bed early.

Yes. Yes to all of this.
I am having much the same set of feelings about Twitter. I used to love it, the flow of good conversations like a really great evening with a bunch of friends. And then gradually it's just turned into an onslaught of bullshit.

FB is similar, though not quite as bad (possibly because it's less open, though Twitter's openness was what I loved about it back in the day); people just latch on to something that is bullshit or faked or just utterly lazy journalism and before you know it it's everywhere and it's just impossible to counterargue effectively, and it makes me so cross. And the personal element just gets subsumed under the mass of dodgy links. (Actually, I think the reason I cope with FB a bit better is that it's still possible to get at the personal content, and occasionally have a proper conversation, but that doesn't seem to be possible at all on Twitter any more.)

Yes, so much this. Everything personal just gets lost in the deluge of crappy stuff.
I miss just having ridiculous conversations over on Twitter about stupid funny things like the Boris bikes fiasco.

I can't speak for Twitter, but I can tell you that when I went to insomnia clinic they went to great pains to show us a substantial literature that demonstrates that although lack of sleep is associated with negative outcomes, earlier death is not one of them.

And while stress makes people ill, it makes them ill with stress. Not with cancer or heart disease!

Not a doctor obviously but I'd be fairly confident in suggesting that cocaine use was more likely a contributory factor in both those premature deaths than stress.

My Dad was fit and hardly ill his entire life - seeing what he's going through now I'd rather die of heart failure thanks!

That seems much more likely (though Fisher's heart attack being at the end of a long flight suggests DVT as another possibility). It was just standard alternative-therapy bollocks, really (and the poster seemed to have some kind of business/professional connection to alternative medicine), but seeing so many people picking it up and retweeting it and saying "I should bear this in mind" really annoyed me.

Yeah, it'd annoy me too. For a start, anyone who suggests you can just stop being stressed has probably never been really chronically stressed in their life else they would know how utterly daft that suggestion is.

Yes indeed. That thread looked complete bullshit to me. Grrr. Don't really need to say more, I think you have said it all eloquently.

OTOH my shingles was triggered by stress (according to my doctor) and a friend's brother blew his aorta out just before Christmas due to high blood pressure which they think is connected to his stress levels.