The Joy of Stress

By Katie Roiphe

Yes, it’s the modern plague1. plague: 令人痛苦或烦恼的人或事。—but anxiety also makes you feel creative, alert and alive. Is it perverse to thrive on it?2. perverse: 有悖常理的；thrive on:靠……成长。

Do you know someone with insomnia3. insomnia: 失眠。who wakes up at 4 am and ends up working and reading novels and cleaning closets and cycling through anxieties until the sky turns pink? I know her and sometimes I am her.

I often hear friends and acquaintances talking about being up in the middle of the night, worrying, whirring, working.4. acquaintance: 相识但不是很熟的人；whir: 心烦意乱。It’s not a boast but there is, to a certain extent, a personal mythology being advanced.5. 这并不是一件值得夸耀的事情，某种程度上来说，这是个人神话的延伸。boast: 值得夸耀的事物。There is a sort of counter-intuitive esprit de corps these anxious friends are tapping into.6. counter-intuitive: 反直觉的；esprit de corps: 集体荣誉感。There is a definite and possibly weird element of pride.7. definite: 明确的；weird: 怪异的。

Stress is pretty universally understood to be a bad thing, as in the most recent contribution to the conversation, Overwhelmed: Work,Love and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte.8. Brigid Schulte: 布丽吉德·舒尔特，美国当代作家。But is it possible that in certain segments9. segment: 部分。of urban life we thrive on anxiety, are comfortable in it? Do we actually, on some strange level, enjoy and revel10. revel: 狂欢，陶醉。in it? Take the common mystery of an already jittery person reaching for yet another cup of coffee: what do they crave?11. jittery: 神经过敏的，紧张不安的；crave:渴望得到。What is the nature of this particular form of energy? Speedy,unreal, sickening, powerful. The tremendous artifice12. artifice: 巧计。of that energy.The reason they are sipping that second or third coffee is that they want to be jangly.13. sip: 啜饮；jangly: 喋喋不休。They are seeking out jangly.

焦虑、抑郁和忙碌是压在许多现代人身上的三座大山，因此曾有网友戏称这是一个“焦、郁、碌”的时代。按常理来说，焦虑是一种负面的情感，不少人曾因此而紧张、烦躁和失眠。然而有没有可能，其实人们根本无法彻底地摆脱焦虑，甚至是以此为生呢？这可不是胡说，不少学者乃至大名鼎鼎的艾略特都这样认为：Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity。换个角度，不难发现适当的焦虑也有它积极的一面：它能使我们保持活力，能让我们的情感更细腻，甚至还能让人变得更聪明。

I am talking here about the speedy, high-strung14. high-strung: 高度紧张的。form of anxiety, the mind racing through a million thoughts and worries and ambitions and fears. The New York Times had until recently a series on anxiety, the heading of which claimed “nearly one in five Americans suffer from anxiety”. Some of this widespread anxiety may be clinical, a serious crippling condition that prevents its sufferers from getting out of bed and putting on their shoes.15. clinical: 无人情味的；crippling: 极有害的。But much of it is surely a cast of mind16. a cast of mind: 性情。, an atmosphere, a style.

There is a particular vitality in anxiety, a sort of nervy power that one can’t say is fun, exactly, but is nonetheless slightly addictive.17. 在焦虑中有一种特别的活力，某种人们不能真正称之为快乐的无畏力量，但却让人有点迷恋其中。nervy: 有胆量的，大胆的；nonetheless: 然而。It can be productive, in a crashing way. It gives us a feeling of motion, of momentum,18. motion: 动作；momentum: 势头，动力。of wheels turning. One gets used to it, maybe seeks it out. One inhabits it, sets up camp.

The influential publisher Arianna Huffington19. Arianna Huffington: 阿里安娜·赫芬顿，美国政治博客Huffington Post创始人之一，被称为“网络媒体女王”。launched a whole campaign against stress. She was so concerned about the ubiquity of this social ill that she vowed to include daily posts on un-stressing in all 13 lifestyle sections of her media behemoth The Huffington Post.20. ubiquity: 无处不在；behemoth: 庞然大物。She used as an inspiring example an employee who successfully battled stress by stopping to gaze at a tomato plant in the concrete, urban nightmare of his life.

But is there something vaguely bovine, dull, about the state of being unstressed?21. vaguely: 有点儿；bovine: 愚钝的。Is there something slow, unfruitful, stagnant22. stagnant: 呆滞的。or dense about calm? You, with your fruity cocktail under the palm trees, are you boring?

One day, someone took me to a big house on the ocean. There were many decks dangling23. dangle: 摇晃地悬挂着。over the white sand. The waves were just outside the window and they roared into my bedroom, with its painted wooden floors. Suddenly I could sleep—nine, 10, uninterrupted hours.The children were busy with sandcastles.My computer very agreeably crashed temporarily—I told myself it was the sea air—so there was no possibility of working or communicating. I was worried about nothing. I spent hours just gazing into the waves. It was superbly soothing.24. superbly: 十分，非常；soothing: 令人宽心的。But who was I?

Anxiety, I came to understand a few weeks later— slipping back into normal life, where I dress my four-year-old while he is sleeping to get him to school on time—is my identity. Is anxiety good for me? Is it perverse to thrive on it?

I was completely unprepared for the best talk I ever gave—well, I had forgotten to write down the date and remembered at the very last minute. The subject was important to me but I had not yet talked about it in public. I had nothing prepared. I was quite sensibly nervous beforehand, which I am not usually, but as I stood up in front of the crowd, the nervousness turned into pure energy; I could feel it as greater-than-usual resourcefulness25. resourcefulness: 足智多谋。, as quickness on my feet.

Apparently this is normal. In 1908, Harvard psychologists invented a thing called the Yerkes Dodson Law, proving that a moderate level of stress can actually enhance one’s performance (too much is bad, but too little is also bad. You need stress to work well).26. Yerkes Dodson Law: 耶克斯-多德逊定律，该定律认为，压力与业绩之间存在着一种倒U型关系，适度的压力能够使业绩达到顶峰状态，过小或过大的压力都会使工作效率降低。moderate: 适中的。This is pretty much what we know from experience: some stress, not overwhelming, crippling waves of it, spurs you on, makes you feel alert, alive.27. overwhelming: 压倒性的，势不可挡的；spur: 鼓舞，刺激。Stress is challenge and challenge is, well, kind of a good thing, though we might prefer a lazy day in the sun.

I’ve noticed that when I am writing something that makes me nervous or uncomfortable, where I have to walk away from the screen every now and then because it’s making me feel sick, it’s always better than when I am writing calmly. When I am typing away with cool, professional detachment,what I am writing is usually sort of blah.28. detachment: 冷漠，冷淡；blah: 空话，废话。

Kierkegaard said: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” which gets at the very particular counter-intuitive joy of it.29. 克尔凯郭尔说过：“焦虑是对自由的迷茫”，这就是指焦虑特有的那种违背直觉的快乐。Kierkegaard: 克尔凯郭尔，19世纪丹麦宗教哲学心理学家，存在主义先驱。It is the bone-deep30. bone-deep: 刻骨的。experience of possibility. Another way to think about this is that if you are safe, you are bored. If you feel comfortable, you lack desire. We think of stress as an unfortunate side effect of busy modern urban life; we tend to imagine that if we were all shepherds lounging with flutes in emerald grass, we would be bucolically redeemed but, in fact, stress may be a sign of engaging life fully or at least intelligently apprehending it.31. shepherds: 牧羊人；lounge:（懒洋洋的）倚、坐；flute: 长笛；emerald:翠绿的；bucolically: 田园（生活）地；redeem: 救赎；apprehend: 理解，领会。

The aura of calm, of contentedness does not have the same frisson as anxiety; it does not draw in or seduce with the edginess of its charm.32. 平静自足的生活气息，其所带来的兴奋比不上焦虑。它缺乏那种因不安的魅力所引发的诱惑感。aura: 气息；contentedness: 心满意足；frisson:（突然的）兴奋感；edginess: 不安。It’s not attractive in the way that anxiety is. A Canadian psychologist,Robin Alter, who has done research on children and anxiety, observed that in anxious children, “the imaginative capacity is often more highly developed than that of calmer children”. It’s true that the child who is envisioning hundreds of red eyes in the darkness watching him or giant moving statues with teeth out of his bedroom window, is more dynamic and better company than, let’s face it, the one who is tranquilly33. tranquilly: 安静地。moving a train around a track. And when you think about people who are interesting, who compel, whose conversation is beyond averagely mesmerising, they are usually highly strung.34. compel: 强迫；mesmerising: 令人着迷的；strung: 精神紧张的。In T. S. Eliot’s well-known words, “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”35. T. S. Eliot: 托马斯·斯特尔那斯·艾略特（1888-1965），诗歌现代派运动领袖；handmaiden: 侍女，女仆。

Do we fall a little bit in love with our anxiety, are we attached to it? It gives a kind of sharpness, a crisp focus to our days that might otherwise be passed in a haze.36. crisp: 条理清楚的，简明扼要的；haze:迷糊，懵懂。Communing with phantom terrors sharpens our pleasure; it lends drama or spark to routine.37. 与虚幻的恐惧进行亲密交谈会增加我们的快感；它使我们每天的例行生活更加戏剧而有活力。commune: 亲密交谈；phantom: 虚幻的。An overdeveloped sense of precariousness38. precariousness: 不安全，不稳定。makes you appreciate some pretty basic things. If you have clocked a few rigorous post-midnight hours colourfully elaborating the various ways you might be dying, come morning you will be over the moon pouring cereal for a child.39. 如果你在午夜后花上几个小时的时间生动地描述你各种可能的死法，到了早上，你就能兴致勃勃地为小孩倒麦片。clock: 花……时间做某事；rigorous: 严谨的；over the moon:兴高采烈的；cereal: 谷物，燕麦。

The truth is that crisis in general, the sense of warding off calamities,of juggling many complicated things, of being harried and hectic and stressed out,40. ward off: 避免，阻止；calamity: 灾难；juggle: 尽力对付；hectic: 忙乱的。can be perversely pleasurable. People hate insomnia but there is, for those who have a lot of it, often a kind of weird secret pleasure in it too. Even though you may hate the exhaustion, you find yourself sort of savouring it, like certain kinds of hangovers: it offers its own vividness.41. savour: 尽情享受；hangover: 宿醉；vividness: 生动。The rawness, the strung-out-ness, the oversensitivity to the world,42. strung-out-ness: 紧张；oversensitivity:过分敏感。the ache, they are all sort of pleasing in their own dark way.They make you feel like you are intensely experiencing the hours,not just slipping through.

Of course, the anxious or stressed out would generally rather not be anxious or stressed out. They would like the problems they intricately obsess over and cycle through at 3 am to be solved—but if they were, what would they do with themselves?43. intricately: 复杂地；cycle through: 循环往复。

Take Joan Didion, the patron saint of the stylishly anxious.44. Joan Didion: 琼·迪迪恩，美国作家；patron saint: 守护神；stylishly: 新式地。She writes in a tone of near-constant neurotic jitteriness, and yet the world she so gorgeously, sensitively apprehends has its own incomparable charisma.45. near-constant: 几乎不变的；jitteriness:神经过敏；charisma: 魅力。She writes, “It will perhaps suggest the mood of those years if I tell you that during them, I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse,the ‘house blessing’ which hung on the walls of her home in West Hartford, Connecticut.46. West Hartford: 美国西哈特福市；Connecticut: 美国康乃迪克州。‘God Bless this house, and be the lintels blessed/And bless the hearth, and bless the board/And bless each place of rest…’47. lintel: 过梁；hearth: 壁炉地面。This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill,so insistently did it seem the kind of ‘ironic’ detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found.”

A little twisted, yes. A little over-aware of fate’s dark possibilities. But imagine a slightly chubby, contented, becalmed Didion.48. chubby: 圆胖的；becalmed: 平静的。The White Album would be a recipe book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem a yoga guide.49. The White Album:《白色专辑》；Slouching Towards Bethlehem:《向伯利恒跋涉》。两者均为琼·迪迪恩作品。All the intensely creative, elegantly expressed, culturally evocative paranoia would be lost.50. evocative: 唤起……的，引起回忆的；paranoia: 妄想狂，偏执狂。

My mother, a prolific writer and inventive worrier, has a scene in one of her novels where a character is overflowing with happiness on a beach.51. prolific: 多产的；inventive: 有创造力的。She is purely and completely elated52. elated: 兴高采烈的。,with her husband and children and because she is so happy, she intuitively scans the horizon for sharks. I always vowed I would not be that person but I find myself, even in my most exultant53. exultant: 狂喜的。moments, looking out on a grey, foggy dawn in the city streets for sharks. The sharks, I have come to understand only just now, are part of the happiness.