It’s well known a persons stress levels are connected to how tense they are.

A high enough level of stress induces a jittery type character and if heightened even more then one gets into what we know as the fight or flight phase.

‘Your getting my back up’ is actually quite an accurate expression to describe that persons who’s pissing one off. Because they are actually making your back more tense. This happens to the degree one approaches the fight or flight phase.

All your core muscles tense, this pulls on the spine and ‘tightens’ up the body making it in a better condition to either kill or flee. It’s the opposite of being relaxed.

When you are in danger this is of course vital. You’d be ill advised to sit around relaxed while a gang was trying to kidnap you. Your better off in flight or fight mode of course.

But it is no way to live in general.

Our current society while full of possible potential dangers is actually physically now safer to live in than it has ever been. Wars are now tending to be faught away from the biggest centers of populations now. That days of tanks parading around the fields of Europe on a war path has seen it’s day and it’s not likely to return.

Our exposure to wildlife that might make an end to us is entirely voluntary. If you don’t want to see lions in nature go to the zoo. Cars are becoming safer. How likely we are to die from anything we eat now is again entirely voluntary and only if one is a glutton or has anorexia.

Medicine in improving constantly. So why is stress still such a massive issue, if not even more so now, and why so many more drugs being used depending on how ‘advanced’ a civilization one lives in?

Because what we consider safe now includes more of what we want and not what we need. We’ve had a level of what we expect as safe raised to the degree that now not getting the telly on right… gets ones back up. With some even throwing the odd remote/phone at the screen in a perversion on the fight/flight facility.

I pity the partners in relationships who constantly ‘get one anothers back up’. But bear in mind.

We NEED this stress. We have to always, at least in our own minds, be seen by ourselves as continually at least interested in our entire survival as a whole. So we focus our concern on a political party. A football team. An abusive partner, A (insert your own way here).

In a nutshell we ensure we carry this load to add to our stress and to the degree our lives become safe and normal… we find things to fix as the problem.

So despite life now being considerably safer than it was during the cold war 50 years ago stress is now even more of an issue. Even though war is now ‘over there’ and no one in the US is being sold reduce cost bomb shelters by the federal government.

So our ‘betters’ have fixed the problem. Making their dope more readily available and make incredible revenue from the only socially acceptable means of dope – drink.

So as we face our ‘woes’ and feel the ‘stress’ and suffer the consequences and seek help from ones GPs, big pharma weighs in and makes more out of the tax payers pocket than the military does now. On drugs.

So the ‘solution’ to stress is being sold to us as anti-depressants, drink is being stigmatized and the competition – street drugs have been declared war on under the guise of ‘war on drugs’ which is a bit of a self-redundant statement considering I once seen two ads run together on US tv.

One was a government PSA saying ‘don’t take drugs’ and the next was an advert from big pharma saying ‘if you feel stress, then this is the drug for you’…

But drink, weed, opioids and anti-depressants all have one ultimate function in relation to stress… let one chill some.

Uppers like cocaine and ecstasy also do this without the sleepy effect and have much worse come downs. Heroin is an opioid.

Psychedelics are being studied as a ‘reboot’ drugs for the brain and scare the shit out of me as much as the government and big pharma. They could in theory be the only means of a ‘clean state’ out there.

But for me the most obvious and safest attempts at stress reduction would be the herb and the drink. Pills and powder scare the shit out of me.

Addiction levels should also be taking into consideration. A few case studies worthy of mention here:

David Jackson, Tommy Smith, Tony Jackson, Marian Czabaskji, Craig Findlay and Nats, Amy and Abbie.