In 1936 the endocrinologist Hans Selye published a short note in Nature about rats exposed to cold, injury and exhausting exertion. Whatever the cause, the body answered with the same pattern. That shared response would later be called stress, a word Selye borrowed from physics, where it names the force applied to a material to test it.

What makes the finding interesting is what it hints at: the body is poor at telling a real danger from a heap of small demands. Hardly anyone runs from a predator now. Plenty of people, though, live with the alarm switched on by an inbox, a notification, a to-do list that never reaches the bottom.

The figures say nothing about causes. Gallup did not ask, and assigning them would be guesswork. What they do show is the scale: that so many people find everything uphill is not a personal oddity or a flaw of character. It is a shared experience.

The weight of choosing

In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up two jam-tasting tables in a California supermarket. One offered 24 varieties, the other just 6. The large table drew more curious shoppers (60% stopped, against 40%), yet only 3% of those who stopped went on to buy. At the small table, 30% did.

Later, Barry Schwartz and colleagues looked at something else: how people live who hunt for the best possible option in every decision, whom they called maximizers. They reported less happiness and more regret, perfectionism and depressive symptoms than people who settle for something good enough. Choosing a lot is tiring. Always choosing the best is exhausting.

Stopping is also a decision.

This is where the slow living idea that less is more starts to make sense, and not as an aesthetic of white, empty rooms. The point is to cut down the number of decisions a person carries around each day. Buying little and well saves time, money and attention. What gets used daily, what touches the skin, what is breathed at home or brought to the table, deserves more care than an impulse purchase. Natural, responsibly made products do not cure stress, and that is worth saying plainly, but they lighten what the body and the surroundings have to absorb, and they last longer. Things bought slowly tend to be looked after.

What cannot be bought

A study of almost 20,000 people in England, published in Scientific Reports in 2019, found that those who spent at least 120 minutes a week in nature reported better health and wellbeing than those who fell short of that threshold. It made no difference whether the time came in one long stretch or several short visits. A local park counts.

Relationships weigh even more. A meta-analysis of 148 studies and over 300,000 people, by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, linked strong social ties to a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period. Enjoying the people nearby, sitting at a table without hurry, is no luxury. It is one of the best-documented investments in health.

Helping shows up in the data too. In a 2008 experiment, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton handed participants 5 or 20 dollars to spend that same day. Those who spent it on other people ended the day in a better mood than those who spent it on themselves, whatever the amount.

Then there is competitiveness. In 1954 Leon Festinger proposed that people evaluate themselves by comparing with others, especially when no objective yardstick exists. In a culture of rankings and shop windows, that comparison never switches off, and rest is impossible while the game is about coming out on top. Celebrating other people’s wins, cooperating, helping without keeping score, eases a pressure almost nobody chose.