DURBAN - A STUDY by Bloomberg last year found South Africa to be the second-most stressed country of 74 surveyed. The title is currently held by Nigeria.
Anyone who has driven through Lagos will understand why. It was damnably close though, with us missing the top spot by a mere point-one percent.
Hopes are pinned on Jacob Zuma staying in power and bumping us into first place.
However, our chances of making it to world No 1 suffered a setback when our Teflon president said at his 75th birthday party that there was no Zulu word for stress. Stress, he said, was a white man’s disease.
“I do not have stress,” he said. You know who else doesn’t suffer stress? Megalomaniacal sociopaths. Self-serving narcissists. Avaricious scofflaws who give fresh meaning to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
“In the Zulu nation‚ stress does not exist. You can go to a traditional healer asking to be healed from stress‚ but they do not have muti for stress.”
Zuma is probably right about this. Traditional healers might not be able to give you muti for stress, but they will give you muti to turn your ultra-violent neighbour into a chicken. This will go a long way towards alleviating the stress that you don’t have.
I’m not sure that Zuma is right when he calls stress a disease. It’s more of an anxious gnawing feeling, which isn’t the same as, say, cancer or tuberculosis.
Sure, stress can probably cause a disease, but you have to watch your terminology. Next thing, you’re saying a virus can’t cause a syndrome and before you know it you’re slumped over a counter telling the barman that you were the president once. Sure you were, sir. I think you’ve had enough.
People who have studied for seven years and know their way around a stethoscope tell me that stress can affect your mind and body. Oh, please. So can alcohol.
It’s pretty much the only reason we drink the filth. But then we get drunk and it's impregnations and proposals and off to the magistrate's court and 10 years later a man in a white coat gives us six months to live.
That's stress for you. It’s not the alcohol. It’s never the alcohol.
As someone who has studied medicine for decades without ever having to worry about exams or what to wear on graduation day, I can confidently say that stress is not the killer it’s made out to be.
The real killers are your boss, your bank manager and your spouse. The accessories are your children and sometimes your parents.
If you’re unhappily married with a rubbish job and monsters for kids, you’re spending a lot of your time in a mental knife-fight in the dangerous whisky bars of your mind.
It’s vital that you win. If you lose, you’re going to get stressed and kill people who aren’t necessarily related to you.
This will make you feel better in the short term. When I say short term, I mean the period between the murdering and the police arriving.
In fact, most studies have shown that homicide as a means of relieving stress is not a viable option. I’m sure there are other studies that say it is. Studies conducted by Islamic State’s mental health professionals, for instance.
Stress can also be triggered by things that other people might consider minor. Like getting to the bottle store an hour before it opens. Or realising that you’ve been contributing to the R550 million given to King Zwelithini and his loved ones over the past 10 years while the Royal Household Trust apparently raises funds for the tribal monarchy down at the Suncoast Casino.
Or wanting to bite the face off someone chewing or breathing too loudly. Misophonia is a real thing. I might have a touch of it. But I don’t let it stress me out.
If I hear it, I just leave. I drive to the airport and leave.
Conventionally, however, the top three causes of stress are the death of a loved one, a divorce and moving house.
There’s no arguing with the first, but I’d say there are more stressful things in life than getting divorced and moving house. Sitting in rush hour traffic, for starters.
Even if I were madly in love with my wife, I’d rather divorce her than sit in traffic every morning and again in the afternoon.
A lot of people do this for their entire working lives. If you live in Cape Town, you’re looking at 800 days – nearly three years – of doing nothing but changing from first to second gear while brimming with hatred for humanity.
While a loved one's death tops the list, death as a thing isn’t stressful at all. People we don't know are dying all the time and we don’t get stressed about that. This is quite normal because we are, in essence, savages.
The positioning of divorce at number two on the list should be condemned and set aside. If death is qualified as stressful only if it happens to a loved one, then so too should divorce.
Divorce is only stressful if you are crazy in love and the person formerly known as sweetheart isn’t. This situation usually presents itself in the space of one terrible evening.
It’s less stressful to hate each other equally over a period of years so that by the time one of you suggests divorce, it’s a huge relief for both of you, so you go out and get drunk and have a last pangalang and she falls pregnant and you have to see each other every second weekend and alternate school holidays for the next 18 years.
I am facing my second divorce and already I am girding my mental loins for a third marriage, which I fully expect to happen because there is little point in stopping once you’ve had two of anything. If you have ever tried two of something and never had a third, I’d like to know what it is.
Having said that, a certain amount of stress comes with the realisation that you have made yet another appalling life choice and have to start all over again.
The stress, though, quickly gives way to excitement, especially if it involves moving into a homeless shelter or mental institution.
Number three on the list is moving house. This is clearly not true. Unless you’re moving from uMhlanga to uMlazi or from Camps Bay to Pollsmoor Prison, there’s no reason to get upset.
The most stressful thing about moving house is trying to stop the packing tape from sticking itself to the roll. Some people lose the packing tape altogether and end up killing the neighbours. That’s what I call stress.
What the hell is the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale? I didn’t even know it existed until 30 seconds ago, which stressed me out because I’m almost done with the column and thought I knew everything.
Here we go, then: “Stress is a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise.” In terms you and I can understand, this translates into: “This is f***ed up and way out of control.”
I don’t know who Holmes and Rahe are and nor do I care. They’re not politicians, so there is no real reason for them to lie. That’s good enough for me. They surveyed more than 5 000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had any experience of a series of 43 events in two years.
Each event had a different weight for stress. The more events the patient added up, the higher the score. The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill.
These events include things like a jail term, sex difficulties, trouble with in-laws, trouble with a boss and minor violations of the law – things that affect all South Africans.
Being a little drunk, I did the test and scored an impressive 393. That was higher than I’ve ever got for anything. With that kind of mark, you want to rush home, burst through the front door and shout: “Honey, I got almost 400 on the test!”
But honey's on the couch, in front of the TV, slack-jawed and drooling with 500mg of benzodiazepines ponying their way around the old bloodtrack.
Anyway. The results of my score? “You have a high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future.”
And that’s it. They don’t tell you that you need to chuck your job, get divorced or stop drinking vodka before 10am. They simply tell you that you’re going to get ill in the near future.
To be fair, they do suggest solutions. For instance, you can learn “conflict resolution skills”. In South Africa, this means whoever got dem skills to pull da gun to resolve da conflict wins da resolution. They also say you can “take things easy and look after yourself”. Not in this country.