You Are Never Too Young or Old for Stress Relief
by Margery Eagan
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
The Boston Herald

You may have read it in the paper yesterday.

Students at Roslindale’s Charles Sumner Elementary School are learning to deal with stress by massaging their temples, breathing slowly, putting their heads on their desks and thinking about some place safe and comfortable.
Sounds New Age nutty, I know. Heads on desk. Think safe and comfortable. What about reading, writing, 2 plus 2, blah, blah, blah.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a road to nirvana for our overwrought classroom, our hysterical workplace, our entire lunatic lives, where a quietly desperate frenzy reigns.

“ Stress is epidemic (in America),” says Dr. Gloria Deckro, who taught the Sumner children anti-stress techniques — and sounds so soothingly relaxed herself.

I mean, maybe you, too, have noticed: You’re unable to cope with life’s tiniest upsets anymore.

Take shopping.

Star Market, just this once, is out of Quaker Toasted Oatmeal Squares, your favorite cereal. You berate the bewildered teen at customer service.

Take daylight-saving time.

This weekend, you had to reset your digital alarm clock, which you could not figure out how to do without directions, which you lost. Consequently, it pulsated all through the night, little red dots flashing and blinking at 2 a.m., at 3 a.m., at 4 a.m. until, you know, you wanted to thrash the thing ‘til it begged for mercy.

Take yesterday’s switch to 10-digit dialing, even for a call across the street.
Not a major catastrophe, to be sure. But maybe you too experienced a rage all out of proportion to the small wasted effort — about a second’s worth — entailed in dialing three extra digits. You did it wrong the first time, so you had to dial again. But you have a touch-tone phone. How long does it take? Irrelevant. Once again, you wanted to thrash the thing ‘til it begged for mercy. What is wrong with us?

Well, it’s not as petty as you might think. It’s not the downside of peace and prosperity. It’s not that in the absence of war and famine and pestilence, the littlest annoyances drive us insane.

Says Deckro of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess, “In war or peace, it is the little day-to-day things that have major negative effects on our health.”

Although the mind may distinguish, she says, the body can’t tell, stress-wise, between being chased by a saber-tooth tiger and fearing a brutal showdown with a boss or a spouse.

And few of us have calming buffers anymore. A rural life. The nurturance of long meals or conversations.

There’s so little quiet in our wired-in, hooked-up lives, period. Well, it’s more complicated, but what it boils down to is this: We have become a nation of road-raging basket cases.

Back at the Sumner School, Principal Lourdes Santiago says she has seen good results from Deckro’s anti-stress techniques. Teacher Kristina Reeves plays her fourth-graders relaxation tapes after recess, “when the children typically are bouncing out of their seats, and they really calm down” and can pay attention again.

Reeves and Deckro have heard the stories: “Kids will say to me,” said Deckro, “when my brother took my toy away, I took a deep breath, and didn’t punch him.” Like a little bit of Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi. In Roslindale.

Personally, I’d been in the grip of my daily panic until hearing Deckro and her colleagues’ tape about how to get rid of tight foreheads and clenched jaws and scrunched eyes and gnashing teeth. I had them all.

“ Let it go,” they say. “Put you head on your desk,” they say. “Release the tension… gently… feel the warmth.” Etc., etc.

Well, why not? We have smoking rooms. Jane Swift’s giving us lactation rooms. Why not meditation rooms, too? Chanting rooms? Little tranquility fountains in the corner, so we could all sit around listening to the water running over rocks? Every hysterical day, it sounds better and better to me.

© 2001. The Boston Herald. Used by permission.

Back to Silver River Institute Resources