The word epidemic gets tossed around promiscuously these days. I recently heard somebody refer to an "epidemic" of bad reality television shows, and someone else complain about an "epidemic" of people willing to be seen in public wearing Crocs. But the word does have a medical meaning—it's a condition or disease that affects an unusually large number of people. I guess that could apply to bad footwear. It certainly applies to stress. Last fall, the American Psychological Association released a major study that told us what we already knew—21st-century America is the most stressed-out place on Earth. A third of American adults are living with "extreme stress," and nearly half believe that their stress levels have increased in the past five years.
That's just the beginning of the bad news. The rest is what we tend to do about stress, which in most cases is nothing, self-denial being another great American tradition. When we do react, it's almost always in ways that are destined to make things worse: We drink too much, eat way too much, and rarely exercise enough. Consequently, we are a nation of jittery insomniacs. I consider myself a (somewhat) normal middle-aged urban adult with all the usual reasons to melt down and, perhaps, an extra dollop of impatience. Like a few million others, I have a teenager, aging parents, and a demanding job. I try to exercise regularly and eat properly, but the evidence seemed to call for a more fundamental solution. "Dad," my daughter pleaded not long ago, in a ticket line at JFK, where I had just begun to light into a representative of the airline that had accidentally deleted our reservations. "Please don't have an airport fit," she begged.
Needless to say, I had the fit, and then spent the flight absorbing the shame of knowing that, thanks to me, my daughter actually has a category in her brain labeled "Airport Fits." The episode stressed me out so badly that I went to a yoga class. No luck: All it managed to induce was an odd combination of humiliation, boredom, and pain.
But I've always had faith in gadgets, so, seeking relief in technology, I bought a gizmo called the StressEraser. Yes, it sounds like something a man with a bad toupee would hawk on cable television at four in the morning.
Guess what, though? It erased my stress. The little biofeedback machine, which is about the size of a BlackBerry, has an infrared fingertip sensor that monitors the way you breathe by translating pulse beats into waves that you can watch roll across the StressEraser's LCD. (Just typing those words makes me calmer.) The machine essentially decodes various nerve signals—it's complicated, but there are stimulating nerves that increase your heart rate and lead to faster breathing patterns, and pacifying nerves that do the opposite. We want the opposite. To get there, you simply slip your finger into the slot and monitor your breathing patterns on the LCD, counting softly as you shed your stress. The waves are supposed to come in gentle arcs; at first mine looked more like a series of daggers. By sounding a little beep when it's time to exhale, the StressEraser teaches you how to calm yourself.
