Messages, e-mailstelephone available 24 hours a day and the widespread idea that all matters are urgent. Our brains are becoming exhausted, our bodies sicker, but the praise of fatigue doesn’t seem to slow down.
Last year, the STADA Health Reportwhich results from research carried out in 23 European countries, showed that more than half of Portuguese people (61%) feel exhausted or at risk of burnout. More than a third (36%) have mental health problems, but only 3% receive therapy. These numbers, records that we should not be proud of, have tended to rise. Women (71%) are more prone to burnout than men (60%) and there is also a significant generational difference: 75% of Europeans under 34 report feelings of burnout, compared to 71% of those aged 35 to 54 and just 53% of those aged 55 and over.
Alerts have multiplied, whether from the World Health Organization or from national professionals and experts. The truth is that we live in constant stimulation, with little time to rest between everything that captures our attention. We live in cities that are always lit and have constant noise; we have artificial lights at home, screens on cell phones, computers and televisions that are filled with notifications and alerts; we sleep little – in Portugal, sleeping habits are worrying, with 36% of Portuguese people sleeping 6 hours or less per night, placing the country among those with the least sleep in Europe.
The costs to our physical and mental health are enormous: stress, anxiety, exhaustion that lead to cardiovascular diseases, among others, make each person who experiences these symptoms a kind of time bomb. We are more irritable at home, at work, with friends. We take medication to limit anxiety, to sleep, to wake up.
And yet, the tendency is to applaud constant tiredness, constant productivity, working long hours. Doing nothing has come to be seen as laziness in a society heavily influenced by the American business style, which makes people believe that 80-hour work weeks are the path to a happy life. We are surprised because more and more relatively young people are suffering from heart attacks and strokes, but we do not relate the constant stress we live under to these consequences.
It is urgently necessary to prioritize rest periods. It is necessary to normalize not responding to all messages and all e-mails and all the phone calls when they reach us on our phones and computers. You need to learn to put down your phones when you get home and enjoy being with people again without looking at the outside world at the same time. It is necessary to normalize the need to stop, breathe and not have stimuli so that the body and soul can recover and be healthy again. It is necessary to normalize peace and silence, in the certainty that they are as fundamental to success – whatever that may be – as work and intense stimuli.
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