5 Seemingly Harmless Things That Are Stressing You Out

5 Open Plan Offices

People spend a lot of time moaning about cubicles, but these days lots of offices have done away with them in favor of an "open plan" where everybody can see everybody else (just think of The Office sans the wacky antics, because, well, that's it). There's a good chance you're reading this article in an office like this right now and, as bad as "cubicle farms" are, these are worse. Stress-wise, at least.

The Stress Factor:

Technically, it's not about the office per se. It's the people in it, and everything they do -- whether you realize it or not. The sneaky thing about stress is that you can feel it without knowing exactly what's causing it. There's the specific kind of stress you get from a guy chasing you with a chainsaw, and then there's the more subtle form caused by the little things -- like a conversation going on nearby that you can't quite hear, or the squeaky wheel on somebody's chair, or somebody continuously walking back and forth behind you. Open plan offices are full of that kind of stuff. You can't put your finger on it, you just involuntarily feel your hand clenching into a fist and think how nice it would be to just punch a dude through a wall.

In one research project, they made a guy work in an open plan office while wearing a helmet that measured his brain activity throughout the day. They found that, despite the guy getting to spend the day pretending he was Professor X and that his desk was Cerebro, his brain was nervously working on overdrive all the damn time. It was processing all of the disturbances in the office, and we do mean all of them -- the subject wasn't just flipping out at the horsey laugh of the dude at the water cooler. Instead, his subconscious took in every little thing around him and rolled it into one giant ball of "I've had enough of this shit."

Yes, even when he didn't consciously feel that he was being annoyed by those around him, his brain was secretly banging its head on the table.

It may be as simple as the conflict between your brain knowing it needs to concentrate in order to not get fired and the environment not allowing it to. There's always a ringing phone, and the only thing between you and that asshole who won't pick it up is empty space. There's always an office clown practicing pantomime on your right side so that you can just see him from the corner of your eye. And worst of all, there's always that nagging feeling that someone is watching you. You can try to tune all of this out, but that's the point -- it requires you to try. As in exert effort, continuously, all the time. That's stressful. You don't feel it as being all that severe from moment to moment, just as you wouldn't think of it as physically strenuous to give somebody the finger. But try to give somebody the finger for nine straight hours.

So it's hardly a surprise that research has found that open plan offices can lead to high blood pressure, stress, high employee turnover and conflict. So why do companies keep making open plan offices? Surely there is some huge, hidden advantage in enclosing their employees in a glorified pen that feeds on their productivity. Why, of course there is: Open plan offices cost 20 percent less than cubicles.

4 All of the Little Background Noises in the World

We live in such a noisy world that even what you think of as a "quiet" room features the faint hum of passing cars outside, the buzz of fluorescent lights, the fan on your desktop computer, your roommate quietly masturbating in the room, etc. All of it is a part of your world, the soundtrack of the straight-to-DVD movie that is your life.

You don't really mind most of these noises -- you're most likely so used to them that if they vanished, the silence would creep you out. But that doesn't mean they're not conspiring to stress the ever-loving crap out of you.

The Stress Factor:

As with the above entry, the key is that the noises you recognize as stressful (the workmen jackhammering your street open at 7 a.m.) are in fact only a small part of the problem. Loud or shrill noises like that get your attention specifically because they're rare and fairly easy to avoid in the grand scheme of things. But when the jackhammer ends, you're left with the low-level noise. The buzzing. The murmuring.

And it gets to you. You can't avoid it. Meanwhile, it actively plots against you and whispers obscenities in your ear, in the safe knowledge that you'll never, ever notice. A study on Austrian children found that people who live in the vicinity of large roads -- where muffled traffic sounds are always leaking through the walls -- have higher blood pressure. It was the same for kids who live in noisier neighborhoods in general. The kids subjected to low-level noise were also found to be much more prone to stress when faced with a demanding situation such as a test.

And the more severe the background noise, the more drastic the effects: Children living near airports and busy highways score lower on reading tests and are slower to develop language skills. Stress hormones mess with the brain's ability to memorize information because the hormones are telling the brain that there are more important things going on. Remember that, from an evolution standpoint, stress is a response to danger; if you hear a mountain lion coming, you no longer give a shit about your cave-painting hobby. Now, in a world where mountain lion attacks are rare, that stress response is triggered by whatever random bullshit is occurring around us.

And no, this isn't just about kids. For adults who have been exposed to significant background noise all their lives, the symptoms they might get to enjoy include high blood pressure, strokes, ulcers, a weak immune system and even a tendency for suicide.

Yes, you should walk away from the apartment that's a great deal "just because it happens to be upstairs from a night club."

3 All of the Little Lights in Your Bedroom

Just as it's next to impossible to find a completely silent room in the modern world, it's almost as hard to find one that's completely dark. You turn off your light when you go to bed, but you don't turn off all of the lights: the streetlight shining in through your window, the blue LED on the front of your computer, your alarm clock, the TV somebody left on, the night light you keep in the hall so you don't trip over the cat on your way to the bathroom at 2 a.m., whatever.

And yes, this is a problem.

The Stress Factor:

Researchers at Ohio State University had two things: a box full of hamsters and a strange vendetta against night lights. They divided the hamsters into two groups, with one group given a night light as they slept, and the other group given complete darkness.

After a no doubt thrilling eight-week period of reviewing hamster footage, a pattern emerged: The ones sleeping with the night lights were showing much more depressive qualities than the ones hanging out in pitch black. They were more passive, ate less and ... that's probably it, because they're hamsters. It's not like you can monitor the tone of their poetry.

The reason behind the depression was chilling -- the night-light hamsters had actually suffered damage to their brains. The hairlike spines on the hippocampus had greatly lessened in density. As these spines help transmit chemical messages throughout the brain, it appears that the hamsters had experienced reduced levels of melatonin, the hormone that tells the body it's nighttime and thus enables proper rest.

Melatonin, incidentally, is secreted only when there's no light.

It's not just a hamster problem, either -- the human brain works in the exact same way. If you sleep with a dim light, you don't get the amount of melatonin you need. On some level, we already know this -- you don't turn out the lights at bedtime to save electricity, you need it dark so you can sleep. Go to sleep during the day and you'll close the curtains to keep the sun out. So if you need darkness to sleep, it makes sense that incomplete darkness equals lower quality sleep. Oh, you are still sleeping, and you might even think you slept well. But your melatonin is still off, and melatonin helps regulate your mood.

Keep it up and it will stress you to the point of full-on depression, not to mention cause a host of other side effects like a weaker immune system, higher blood pressure and increased risk of brain-related health problems. But hey, thanks to the consumer electronics industry for continuing to put blue LED lights on every device in the house.

2 The Geomagnetic Field

The geomagnetic field is a giant wave of magnetic energy that extends from the Earth's core all the way to space, where it meets the sun's solar wind. Occasionally, the sun will let off what is essentially a giant fart into said wind. This causes an eruption of freaking huge solar flares that can reach the size of 10 Earths, heading right at our geomagnetic field with all the subtlety you'd expect of a gargantuan star fart.

This disturbance hits Earth with a host of wacky effects, such as sudden changes in weather and the electromagnetic grid. The geomagnetic field can even stop your toilet from working, because the universe enjoys petty dickery like that. But having to call the plumber and explain to his carefully maintained poker face that space broke your toilet again is not the really stressful part about the geomagnetic field. No, it goes directly for your brain.

The Stress Factor:

Scientists have found fairly damning connections between periods of high geomagnetic activity and stress. Not just any kind of stress, either -- we're talking dangerous depression here. Over the course of the last five decades, the peaks of geomagnetism and suicide rates tend to match up. Another study found that 10 to 15 percent of the population appears to be constantly affected by geomagnetic activity.

While the hows and whys behind the phenomenon aren't entirely clear, the reigning theory suggests that the geomagnetic storms are screwing up our pineal gland -- the part of our brain that senses magnetism much in the same way many animals do. However, the pineal gland doesn't use its magnetism powers for the same reason as the animals (they use it for navigation). It uses its magneto-sense to preside over the circadian rhythm (our internal clock) and melatonin production. Yep, it comes back to melatonin again.

So just as the dim lights in your bedroom messed up your melatonin production, so does this. And as we established just minutes ago, melatonin helps decide what kind of mood you're in today. Which apparently depends on how flatulent the sun is feeling at the moment.

1 Smartphones

The smartphone is the defining object of the 2010s, much in the same way iPods were in the 2000s and cocaine was in the 1980s. Everyone and their mother has one, and it's easy to see why: It enables you to read your email while you commute, your calendar is always with you and when you're heading into that important meeting and think you're missing some key information, you can bring up an Internet browser and look at some nice porn to take your mind off it.

It's hard to see how a gadget like that would cause stress. If anything, it should relieve it. Isn't playing a fun iPhone game at the dentist's office better than waiting in silence? Isn't knowing your wife can call you if there is trouble better than not knowing?

The Stress Factor:

Have you ever felt "phantom vibrations"? You know what we're talking about; it's where you think you feel a vibrating notification from your phone, yet when you check, nothing has happened. Boom! That's smartphone-induced stress, right there in your face.

It's called the "helpful-stressful cycle," and it works like this: You buy a smartphone with the thought that it would help you manage your workload and schedule. But the rest of the world now knows you have it. Your ability to stay in contact while on the road (or at home, or at a party, or in church, or ...) isn't treated as a nice bonus by the rest of the world. They now expect it. So now it's not just nice that you can be reached if something comes up, it's assumed that you're staying on top of every situation. Sure enough, research has found that your stress levels increase with the number of times you check your texts and emails.

And that makes it nearly impossible to focus on the task at hand, even if that "task" is a picnic with your wife or a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's. Every time you check your email, it takes 64 seconds before your mind can get back to whatever you were doing before. For people who check every few minutes, this can waste hours upon hours of perfectly good brain-time every week.

People wind up obsessing over the blings and buzzes of their phones for the same reason gambling is so addictive; if a person only gets rewarded (with a notification/gambling win) occasionally at random intervals, he'll still keep checking and repeating the action -- because the reward could come aaaany time now.

Find more from XJ at nocabooks.

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