Combating Our Cranky Culture
By Carol P. Waldhauser

Feeling restless, stressed out, confused and fearful most of the time, Stanley J. Doe, Esquire, asked himself, “What is wrong with me?” In fact, “Stan the Man,” as his friends refer to him, stated, “Sometimes I feel so wound up it takes only the smallest thing to go wrong, and I explode, regardless of where I am or whom I am with. I seem to lose all control.”

For Stan, the pressures of competition, the unpleasant professional interactions, the never-ending deadlines, as well as the chronic environmental stressors (i.e., traffic jams, road rage) were quickly overshadowing his law school ideals. He also knew that he would crash from “burnout” if he did not learn to responsibly cope with the negativity that surrounded him.

How Did We Become a Cranky Culture?

As described by C. Leslie Charles in Why is Everyone So Cranky?: “Over the past half century, ten powerful trends have been influencing how we live, work and look at the world. We’ve witnessed these events and the media has reported them.” According to Charles, there are 10 trends complicating our lives:

1.    Compressed Time
2.    Communication Overload
3.    Disconnectedness
4.    Cost
5.    Competition
6.    Customer Contact
7.    Computers
8.    Change
9.    Coming of Age
10.  Complexity

To further substantiate the foundation of these trends, she offers a historical perspective.

• The Fabricated Fifties: Birth of a Dream. Life was structured and boundaries were clear: Monday through Friday were business or school days. Saturday we shopped and did domestic chores, and Sunday was a day off for the rest of us. We knew our neighbors.  People went for strolls at night and felt free to drop in on one another. The introduction of our superhighway system offered us unprecedented mobility. Little did we realize these same arteries also signaled the birth of today’s disconnectedness, fragmenting our neighborhoods, communities and culture in ways we never dreamed possible.
• The Skeptical Sixties:  Tattered Dreams and Disillusionment. The pendulum took a wide swing in the Sixties. Television was now entrenched in our daily lives. Neighborhoods mutated as those who could afford it migrated to the suburbs and bought a second car with the introduction of fringe shopping centers and malls.
• The Sassy Seventies:  The Rise of Consumerism. With Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, our faith in political leaders hit a new low. We turned to consumerism as a pick-me-up. Feeling a surge of middle class affluence, we excelled as consumers, affording the cost of cars and big-ticket items by the size of the monthly payments instead of the purchase price.
• The Egotistical Eighties: Access, Overload, and Excess. If we thought consumerism reigned in the Seventies, it was just a warm-up. Chain stores and supermarkets were open for business 24 hours a day and ATMs assured us of instant, accessible cash.
  Personal computers offered endless capacity for communication in a world that was already pumping out more information than we could handle. Plagued with too many choices of what to watch or read, besieged with junk mail and more periodicals than we could keep up with, overwhelmed with work-related communications and information, we found ourselves on permanent fast-forward, overloaded in a complex consumptive world that refused to stop changing. Meanwhile, we clung to our careers with fervor, bringing home our overstuffed briefcases each night, lest we fall behind.
• The Nasty Nineties: Talk Is Cheap. In the Nineties…the Internet, online news groups, listserves and chat lines exposed us to just about any topic of interest, plus endless shopping and spending opportunities. Continually accelerating technological change created a lust for pagers, personal cell phones, system upgrades, personal web pages, and constant e-mail contact, regardless of need.
  Increased speed limits added to the turmoil of our already revved up lifestyles and the pressures of compressed time, computers, competition and customer contact complicated our lives to the breaking point. Emotional eruptions in our homes and workplaces, our streets, and even on commercial airlines reflected our time-compressed lives, inner conflicts and inability to cope. (Charles, p. 11-15)
  Not to mention that each decade experienced a steady and consistent increase in the number of licensed practicing lawyers!

So, How Do We Cope in Such a Cranky, Stressful World?

Stan realized that his thoughts, not events, lead to his anger. Feelings, or moods, are created by thoughts about events, not by the events themselves. In fact, we understand much more about how we create our own emotional distress (chronic stress) even though causes for stress and poor mental health are a combination of demanding life events and inadequate coping skills. Just as we have learned to think and act in a way that causes us to be stressed, we can learn to change.

Dr. John Schindler might have best defined happiness when he said, “Happiness is a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.” Similarly, Trevor Powell, in Free Yourself from Harmful Stress, suggests: “Certain ways of thinking and acting are likely to lead to fulfillment and positive mental health, just as the opposite ways of thinking and behaving are predisposers to stress and unhappiness.” He further offers 12 steps to positive mental health:

1. Take responsibility for your own life.  You are responsible for your thoughts, actions, feelings, decisions and their consequences. Unless you take responsibility you will not strive to change what can be changed. Rather, you will blame other people or life events for the way you think and feel. A person who does not take responsibility is a victim.
2. Be flexible in your thinking. We all have needs, but when these become too demanding we become stressed.
3. Accept reality as a mixture of good and bad. Accept the reality of unfairness, accept that you are not always right, accept that things change, and accept that circumstances are not usually clear-cut.
4. Savor the moment. At times, slow down and reflect on the world around you and what is important in life.
5. Learn to live with frustration.
   Build you tolerance of frustration by putting yourself into frustrating situations.  View it as a challenge.
6. Accept and take care of yourself. We are all fallible, complex mixtures of good and bad, strengths and weaknesses.
7. Express positive and negative feelings. Express your thoughts, feelings and emotions in an open, assertive way without violating the rights of others. Learn to say no.
8. Work toward goals.
9. Think rationally and creatively. Formulate your own solutions, rather than accepting what you have been told.
10. Manage your time, and maintain balance. Achieve a balance between work and leisure, family and friends, being serious and having fun, being with people and being alone. 
11. Develop hobbies and absorbing interests. Experiment until you find an interest that is absorbing, meaningful and fulfilling to you and then pursue it.
12. Develop and maintain relationships.

Remember, many stress-related problems occur as a result of distorted thinking.  By understanding more about the relationship between thoughts and feelings you can equip yourself better to challenge these thoughts.  For more information about this and other issues that may be hampering your quality of life and quality of work, contact the MSBA’S Lawyer Assistance Program at (410) 685-7878, ext. 252, or via e-mail at cwaldhauser@msba.org.

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Publications : Bar Bulletin: March, 2003