Stress Hygiene

It started innocently enough. Daily life was training our nerves, and we were running on fumes—of energy and psychological endurance. We processed stimuli while inhaling 10,000 liters of air a day, as nerve impulses rushed through us at 350 km/h. Then the world trembled with a faint pulse—yet the tension hadn't yet ignited our muscles, and breath was still uncounted. Until came the clenched jaw, the inability to take a full breath, micro-shaking hands, sweating, a twitching nerve in the eye. Hysteria? Or perhaps simply a systemic overload? Artists don’t waste their pain—they examine ways of existing within a reality of overstimulation, controlled productivity, and unspoken anxiety, essentially in the face of everything. Stress Hygiene is a story about survival strategies in a world of chronic tension. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”*, especially in a reality that leaves no space to breathe. Stress Hygiene not only diagnoses the overload, but subtly points to strategies that escape the logic of the system: withdrawal, tenderness, attentiveness. Sleep, relinquishing excess, turning inward—this is not escapism, but resistance in its purest, if least spectacular, form. *Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: and Other Essays, Ixia Press, New York, 2017, p. 130. First published in 1988.