Good Housekeeping, in the editorial staff's infinite kindness, posts a free stress-relieving tip each and every week. While I have never been privileged to visit their publication offices, I imagine that they must be a center of creative chaos for the magazine to know how useful these tips are in modern life.

Stress is a major cause of various diseases and disorders in our modern day, contributing to such diverse problems as headaches, hypertension, and autoimmune diseases. Everything from cold sores to multiple sclerosis is made worse by excessive stress, and in sufficiently high and repeated doses, stress can kill. Stress has repeatedly been identified in medical studies as one of the main contributors to cardiovascular and gastrointestinal disease.

There is also a modern workplace standard that if you're not so stressed out you're seeing double, you're not doing your job. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, corporations have tried to make humans conform to a mechanistic world view, wherein everything and everyone performs their functions as well as ordered and greased cogs. However, even if we accept this mechanical paradigm as accurate, everything needs maintenance to continue performing to capacity. Also, humans aren't machines, we're thinking, feeling, living, breathing people. To try to treat ourselves as machines means missing out on most things that make life worth living and work worth going to. These modern paradigms and practices have led to both infinitely multiplying health care costs and an untold amount of suffering to the American populace.

Using these stress relieving tips to reduce the negative effects of modern day life can prevent some diseases, reduce the effects of others, and increase life-span without the need for medication, which always carries the potential for side effects. In addition, reducing stress improves the quality of everyday life, a quality which is beyond science's ability to study directly but that affects every portion of our lives.

Posted by Loni.