Enayati - New Rules for Health and Happiness in the Age of Anxiety

The Stressed Columnist

P eople often chuckle when I tell them I am a stress columnist. I will grant that it is an odd title, but the job itselfexamining stress and its impactshas become crucial in modern life.

My journey into the stress vortex began in late 2010 when I wrote two series of essays for CNN.com: one about the milestones of my brawl with cancer and the other about parenting toddlers in the wake of a health crisis. A few months after the latter, Mary Carter, who ran CNN Health in those days, asked me to give her a call.

We are going back to the basics, she told me. We have sex and sleep covered. I need you to write about stress.

Stress.

Her suggestion blindsided me. I was, in spite of my relative youth, already an old pro at full-catastrophe livingthat is, constant disaster punctuated by brief periods of quiet. Because of this, stress was my default; it was the normal I accepted as status quo and not something to be questioned. The idea of exploring stress, writing about it and finding ways to manage and alleviate it, seemed strange. I was also far more interested in writing about other health topics. Three years out from a scrape with death, I had a bone to pick with our cultures very linear way of thinking about health and illness.

I want you to take our readers into the stress vortex, she continued. People are half out of their minds with stress. Tell them how to help themselves.

I opened my mouth to protest, to tell Mary that I didnt know the first thing about stress.

And then closed it.

This was not strictly true.

I was, in fact, Waldo in the Wheres Waldo of stressful life circumstances: As a young child, I had been banished from my homeland because of my faith, then virtually orphaned for years in the wake of exile. In my adult life I spent years as a desperately unhappy Big Firm lawyer, someone who was standing in the shadows of the Twin Towers on the day they crumbled, and who suffered a vicious depression afterward. And then, the final insult: late-stage cancer in my thirties. Surgery, six rounds of high-dose chemo and radiation later, the fact that I was still standing was something of a miracle, given the odds of survival I had been quoted three years earlier.

The book of my life was a virtual encyclopedia of disaster. What didnt I know about stress?

It was a compelling proposition. I had researched and read reams across a variety of disciplinesscience, philosophy, self-help and spiritualityin the wake of my various catastrophes. And all that information and advice resonated, more or less, as I read the books. But it stuck only in the way New Years resolutions stickfor days, weeks, sometimes months. The clarity was always somehow transient. Eventually it dissipated, and sooner rather than later. Lasting peace proved itself elusive.

In the end, it was the name of the column that clinched the deal for me.

Seeking Serenity, we decided after volleying several options back and forth. The quest for well-being and life balance in stressful times.

I remember turning the words over in my head. It was a questit said so in the title. No promises.

I can do this, I thought. I can seek serenity.

As for the prospect of well-being and life balance in stressful times, was that even possible? If so, I wanted it badly.

It was not until much later that I wondered at the mysterious forces that had set me on this path. All I knew then was that my editor was sending me on an assignment with stress as a road map. Two weeks later I officially entered the stress vortex. It would be the journey of a lifetime.