Posts Tagged ‘anxiety and stress’

According to an article in the Observer Food Monthly, happy cows make for better meat. As a life long vegetarian, I am not writing this as an advert for anyone’s meat or a justification for its being ‘produced’ in the first place. But I do think the experiences of farms which do everything to provide a stress-free life and death for their cattle are, as well as a lesser evil, interesting for us humans too…

In “Mother- and Father-Reported Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions: Relations to Young Children’s Emotional Understanding and Friendship Quality”, researchers led by Dr. Nancy L McElwain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied over 50 pre-school children, firstly assessing their emotional maturity, and then observing play sessions with a friend. In a situation designed to produce stress and conflict it turned out that the optimum situation for the child was one very involved parent and one much less so.

It may be comforting to realise that most people, most of the time, are far too self absorbed to notice any of the myriad ways in which many of us convince ourselves that we are doing something wrong (on a long continuum from something foul and inexcusable, to something less than perfect). But in the long run it is hardly a comforting picture, everyone walking around thinking about what everyone else is thinking about them; in fact it looks like a colossal waste of time and energy.

It’s official! Or at least one study, the Framingham Offspring Study ‘Marital status, marital strain, and risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality’, shows that women who bottled up their feelings during arguments with their spouse were four times as likely to die during the 10 year study period as those who told their husbands exactly how they felt.

It is of no surprise to anyone that women in their thirties or forties coping with work, young children and ‘running a home’ are exhausted to an extent which is dangerous to their health. What can we do about this dramatic state of affairs?