Hadley Coull highlights the social and cultural conditions that are driving stress, not just the everyday frictions of our lives, in response to an article by Joel Snape.
Joel Snape’s article (What does stress really do to our bodies, 17 May) was informative regarding the physiology of stress, yet narrow in articulating the broader drivers of chronic stress in modern life. The piece frames stress largely through everyday frictions: hectic school runs, online arguments, forgotten shoes, driving fines and doomscrolling. It then suggests that stress management is primarily an individual regulatory issue: breathing patterns, rumination, resilience, therapy, exercise and self-care.
Yet much contemporary stress is not driven simply by low-level everyday frictions. It is produced by aspects of modern life that have become psychologically corrosive: social atomisation, economic precarity, platform logic, transactional systems and the erosion of communal life.
Increasingly, many people experience life not as nourishing or relationally supportive, but as extractive. They feel unseen, undervalued, replaceable, emotionally underheld and permanently “on”. This is not a breathing-pattern problem.
Stress is increasingly a lived cultural condition, not just a physiological one. Yet contemporary discourse often performs a curious sleight of hand, framing distress as a personal resilience issue to be managed internally, while leaving the social conditions that generate it largely unexamined.
None of this is to dismiss therapeutic techniques. Exercise, mindfulness and regulated breathing can help calm acute physiological activation. But they are downstream interventions. They are not substitutes for meaning, stability, reciprocity, recognition, affection or community.
Hadley Coull
Solihull, West Midlands
