Author Topic: Stress and the Filipinos  (Read 1508 times)

lumine

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Stress and the Filipinos
« on: June 27, 2007, 07:41:31 PM »
Sure, Filipinos are resilient, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t feel stressed.

by MICHAEL L. TAN



HOW DO we say we're stressed in Filipino?

We don't. Well, at least not in a way that we would in English: I am stressed. It just doesn't work out; we don't, as far as I know, have a word in any of our Philippine languages for stress and being stressed.

But that doesn't mean we Filipinos don't ever experience stress. We feel it all the time and we see it producing illnesses, both physical and mental, both fleeting (as in having to run to the toilet) and serious, life-threatening ones. Because stress affects the body's immune system, we can say all ailments are in one way or another stress-related, from asthma to singaw (canker sores), to cardiovascular ailments and even infectious diseases.

There's also a tendency to dismiss stress-related illnesses as "psychological," and that these are self-limiting, easily resolved. The fact is that stress can so overwhelm people that they lapse into depression, resorting to destructive behavior, directed toward the self, or toward others.

The drug companies, especially those producing vitamins, have tried to cash in, pushing their products through advertisements showing stressed people and dangling promises: with our product, you can meet the many stresses of life, and of the world, and survive without falling ill. One vitamin has even gone to the extent of incorporating the word "stress" into its brand name.

But doctors — at least reputable ones — will tell you that medicines are of limited use for handling stress. Vitamins can help you to deal with the harmful chemicals produced in the body that come after stress, but as long as you don't deal with the stress itself, you eventually lose out.

Besides the vitamin ads, the media bombard us with all kinds of articles about, and ads for, New Age therapies that supposedly help us deal with stress — to name a few, yoga and meditation, spas offering massage and aromatherapy, soothing music interspersed with sounds of birds and frogs. But these are often expensive fads with exaggerated claims.

Not enough's being done to understanding stress in its local context, yet stress is mediated through culture: from the very nature of the stressors, to the ways we respond to the stress. Understanding this local context might help us develop more culturally appropriate, and therefore more effective, ways to deal with stress.



STRESSORS ARE not universal. For example, we say "noise" is stressful, but what exactly is noise?

Culturally, we have different thresholds for these sounds. I have a nephew and a niece who were born and bred in Canada, and they find the Philippines too "noisy": the jeepneys, the arcade games in malls, even the way people talk. Yet they have no problems tuning into hard rock music on their iPods.

My nephew and niece also find crowds stressful; yet a Filipino sees a crowd and is delighted, "Uy, masaya." Westerners crave privacy; the Filipino is stressed by solitude. We're not alone, of course, in finding pleasure in crowds and camaraderie. Culture adapts to circumstances and we are only one of many countries with large dense populations that have learned to live with the maddening crowds, complete with the noise. The Chinese, for example, refer to "merriment" as re nao, the words for "hot" and "noisy."

While we enjoy noise, we're quite sensitive to olfactory assaults. Filipinos will claim some odors are so bad they cause a stomachache. We sniff everything, from food to lovers, and the smells we find good, we tend to indulge to an excess. No wonder aromatherapy's taken off in the Philippines, as did those terrible car fresheners and deodorizers.

Beyond these sensory stresses, we Filipinos do face many sources of stress, around work and livelihood mainly. Farmers worry about drought and typhoons; urbanites go berserk with tyrannical bosses and vicious gossipy office-mates.

Rural or urban, we all face the stresses of family, perhaps more so than in Western countries. We like to say we are family-oriented, with relatives always on hand to help out. But the extended Filipino family can be stressful too, with all its obligations. Overseas workers have a particularly difficult time with all the expectations family members have back home. I've met Filipinos overseas, from Hong Kong domestic workers to physicians in the United States, who postpone returning home for years because they dread the jeepneyloads of relatives waiting for pasalubong (gifts).

But the balikbayan in California has the advantage of distance. The poor migrants who go from impoverished rural areas to work in big cities face even greater stress from family relations, who can easily contact their now "rich" urban cousins for a share of the pittance these earn in the city.



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