Finding Rest in Stress Culture Ashley Kim
I
’ve always felt like I belonged in New York instead of Southern California. A host of little things about my hometown irk me: people walking slowly, sand at the beach, flip-flops in public. More broadly, I’m compatible with a lifestyle that’s fast-paced and goal-oriented, not laid-back. What’s the use of sunbathing? Or smelling the roses? In other words, my personality is a stereotype of Columbia’s stress culture. I’m not alone: I know countless other students, like me, are chronic perfectionists and workaholics, whether or not we admit it — and whether or not we see such tendencies as harmful. But recognizing the presence of stress culture isn’t revolutionary; I’ve heard the term in relation to Columbia long before stepping foot on campus. Labeling a tendency isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for me to realize that perhaps one of the reasons I was drawn to Columbia was because of its stress culture. Why was a self-destructive environment attractive to me in the first place? Why are we so aware of
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our own dangerous inclinations, yet unable to change? And what is it about stress that makes it so irresistible? We tend to think about stress culture like an external threat, but it’s actually more like an addiction. The danger lies not only in outside pressure, but internal compulsion. It is much the same with other addictive patterns of behavior, including eating disorders. When I tell people I struggled with an eating disorder, multiple people have responded, “Your self-control is just too strong.” Or, “My self-control isn’t strong enough to have that problem.” I understand the reasoning. If self-control is simply the ability to rein in impulses and desires, such as hunger, anorexia must be self-control gone to the extreme. It is true that starving requires a certain level of restraint around food that’s easily confused with self-control. But to paint a simple spectrum with, say, anorexia on one extreme and binge eating on the other, is to fatally misunderstand self-control, as if the