Stress Test

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
30 june 2008--For weeks before a store down the street from where I live in Berkeley opened, it was unclear what it would sell — materially, anyway. Rather than having a sign describing the merchandise, the windows were papered over with foot-high aphorisms in punchy red and white type. “Friends are more important than money.” “Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to.” True enough, I suppose. But the one that caught my attention was this: “Stress is related to 99 percent of all illness.”
I tried to imagine how that claim made it past the copywriters and project managers who must have approved it. It was hardly as benign as the suggestions that people should floss daily or drink lots of water. Or was it? Somewhere along the line, maybe when yoga studios began to outnumber Starbucks outlets, the notion, at once modern and primitive, of the mind’s irrefutable power over the flesh became the conventional wisdom.
It’s not that I think the mind-body connection is a total sham. But even where it would seem most established, say in the relationship between stress and heart disease, the mechanism is unclear. Is stress an independent risk factor or does it merely influence others, raising blood pressure or encouraging over-eating? Either way, popular mythology both simplifies and generalizes the potential harm, applying it to everything that ails us. After all, it feels true: I’m more at peace with my frenetic life after a few rounds of sun salutations. Yet, what does that prove?
Admittedly, I’m a tad touchy about this. Eleven years (and, as of this writing, 6 months, 2 days, 19 hours and 30 minutes) ago I found out I had breast cancer. I later endured years of multiple miscarriages and failed infertility treatments before conceiving a child. So I’ve fielded my share of intimations that stress, or some other self-inflicted wrong thinking, could be the source of my troubles: I should relax, take a vacation, express my anger. I do my best. In a nod to that latter advice, I yelled at the screen during “Sex and the City” when Charlotte, who has an adopted Chinese daughter, becomes unexpectedly pregnant and explains: “People always say that when you stop trying it can happen. My doctor says that she knows other couples who’ve adopted, and then they get pregnant.”
The idea that easing up on the pressure kick-starts women’s fertility intuitively seems sound. Everyone knows someone (or someone who knows someone) who gave birth after adopting. From the 1930s through 1950s, according to “The Empty Cradle,” a history of infertility, medical literature actually promoted adoption as a “cure,” claiming it resulted in pregnancy “more often than not.” Freudians, too, counseled that infertility was psychological, the result of maternal ambivalence; resolve those feeling through adoption, and fecundity would follow.
Except — leaving aside the insinuations that adoption is a means to an end rather than its own joyous experience, and that women who become easily pregnant are never ambivalent — it’s not true. As early as 1949, a study of adoptive parents co-written by the infertility pioneer John Rock showed they conceived at the same rate as nonadopting infertile couples: around 10 percent. (Subsequent research has put the likelihood as low as 3 percent.) What’s more, according to a 2005 study of women undergoing in vitro fertilization, published in the journal Human Reproduction, stress had no impact on pregnancy rates. The fretful conceived as readily as the chill.
I suspect women today may be particularly vulnerable to placing the locus of illness in their heads rather than their bodies. In part that’s because the causes of the ailments we’re prone to — reproductive cancers, arthritis, fibromyalgia — are often mysterious in origin. But it may also be an artifact of our rapid and successful social progress. We of the postfeminist generation grew up being told we could do anything, be anything, if we just put our minds to it. Yet, if we have the power to create our own fates, wouldn’t the corollary be that we’re also responsible for our own misfortunes? And, in a kind of double magical thinking, shouldn’t we be able to cure ourselves using the same indefatigable will? No surprise then, that in a 2001 Canadian study of 200 ovarian-cancer survivors, almost two-thirds believed that stress caused their disease and more than 80 percent attributed their survival to a positive attitude. A related study of women who had breast cancer produced similar results — fewer than 5 percent chalked up their survival to any medical treatment. Or (as I do) to just plain good luck. Meanwhile, a Danish study of 6,689 women, published in 2005, found those who were highly stressed were 40 percent less likely than others to get breast cancer.
Susan Sontag noted that a culture’s maladies are apparent in the emotional causes it attributes to illness. In the Victorian period, cancer was “caused” by excessive family obligations or hyper-emotionalism. In the 1970s it was “caused” by isolation and suppressed anger. So the assertion that stress underlies 99 percent of illness may indicate more about the healthy than the sick. Stress is our burden, our bogyman, and reducing it is the latest all-purpose talisman against adversity’s randomness. And maybe it helps. Maybe meditating and letting go of my anger at people who drive for miles with their left-turn signal flashing would improve the quality of my life, if not its length. Or maybe it would be more the equivalent of forcing a New Yorker to live in rural Maine.
As for the new store down the street from me, it turns out that it sells “yoga-inspired apparel.” At first I refused to patronize it, but eventually I broke down. They do free hemming. And that saves me a lot of time — and stress.