Stress-Busting

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When did “stress” become the public enemy of health and creativity? It’s an interesting question, now that doctors attribute medical ailments to “stress,” corporations hold stress-management seminars, and friends talking about problems are told to just not “stress out,” because “stress” itself is their problem. In fact, stress-management is the product sold by several billion-dollar industries.

Author Angela Patmore tells Ode Magazine, “A lot of stress management is tranquilizing people, giving relaxation therapies and massages. I believe that’s harmful, because instead of empowering people, it slows them down…. We’re creating a society of people who are afraid of working. Besides, all this talk about stress doesn’t solve underlying workplace problems. It distracts attention from an organization that is run poorly, for instance.”

She writes in the Guardian, “Arousal and emotions have been turned into syndromes, and an industry with more members than our armed forces drip-feeds us alarmist medicalising twaddle known as ‘stress awareness’ about our brains and bodies, the effect of which is to warn us, ‘Let us calm you down or you will die.'”

We should seek resolution, not relaxation, she says, in a philosophical, psychological, and historical critique of that one word that has come to stand for so much.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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