Everyone Talks About “Destressing” Now — and How to Destress Has Become a New Mysticism | 100 Big Questions About Life

“Destressing” remixed with “lifestyle”: a contemporary hybrid philosophy — or mysticism.

For anyone alive today, if one feeling really deserves the name “disease of the age,” it is probably just “stress.”

Chinese New Year is the textbook moment when stress detonates. Every year around then, people scramble to collect material for “Chinese New Year survival guides,” bracing for the soul-searching questions relatives of every stripe will fire off: “How much do you make?” “Are you seeing anyone?” “Where did you buy the apartment?” “When are you registering the marriage?” “Why no second child yet?” Minors may have it a little easier, but they can't dodge their own round of talent testing either: “How did the exams go?” “You're this old and you still won't say hello to people?” “Can you understand the English on TV?”

In short, whatever your age, that week means several rounds of one particular stress: having your entire life sized up by a handful of people you see once a year.

The trouble doesn't vanish when the holiday ends. It just breaks up into countless small problems in daily life — the “minor stresses” that don't look life-threatening but that you run into constantly all the same. Take the ones we've written about before: online social stress (“Is it rude to claim a red envelope in a group chat the second it drops?”), bad-news stress (so much negative news every morning that the world feels like it's caving in), under-information stress (the constant fear you've missed something useful), information-overload stress (wherever you go, one hot topic fills your whole field of vision), reciprocity stress (uneasy because someone was kind to you), after-work stress (off the clock but never offline)... and so on.

Once enough people had noticed these “minor stresses,” demand for “destressing” followed, and some of it turned into a commercial craze in its own right. Secret Garden, which topped Amazon's bestseller list in 2013, sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and pulled the whole adult coloring-book market along with it. In 2016 the fidget toy Fidget Cube set off a funding frenzy on Kickstarter, raising more than $6 million against an original goal of $15,000. And in 2018 the ten top-grossing mindfulness and meditation “wellness” apps took in 170 percent more worldwide in the first quarter than they had a year earlier.

It isn't only products. The idea of shedding unnecessary stress by simplifying your life sells well around the world too — whether that's danshari, the Japanese art of discarding; minimalism; the Nordic life philosophy; or the “no-buy” movement that caught on recently. Each may start out as some kind of “philosophy,” but after a stretch of packaging and mutation, the part the public ends up remembering is usually the part about consumption — which is, naturally, also the easiest part to understand and copy.

From the material to the spiritual, the successful marketing of every kind of “destressing method” raises a puzzle people have posed countless times: can stress really be “relieved” this way? The heavy, existential kind, nine times out of ten, can't be (that share is now being taken over by paid-knowledge products). Even as everyday relief, not everyone is buying: some find that coloring books don't relieve stress at all but instead leave them clumsy and set off trypophobia; some think danshari amounts to pointless penny-pinching plus throwing things out; others think mindfulness is no different from idling your time away... The only consensus available is probably this: stress is like breathing. Do something about it or don't — as long as your life still holds a trace of lost control, of waiting, of the unknown, it will stay right beside you. “Destressing” is less a method than a mysticism.

People do have a strange, durable enthusiasm for mysticism. The classical schools — exercise, meditation, reading — don't suit the modern slacker, who has no willpower; besides, some stresses are too slight to deserve so solemn an answer. So we have also invented “quick” fixes you can improvise out of whatever is at hand: if the little red unread badges on your phone bother you, wipe them all out at once; if the bubble wrap a package came in looks fun, save up a stack and pop it one bubble at a time in front of a soap opera; if lining up your stationery by color gives you a sense of achievement, save the household clean-out for the day before a deadline. Money and your life are out of your control anyway, so put them aside and do the opposite: attend to the “first-world problems” that are easiest to get your hands on. If it buys even one second of happiness, call it effective.

To find out how people relax when they aren't eating, gaming or sleeping, QDaily Research Lab ran several open-ended surveys, among them “What have you tried that claims to help you escape anxiety but did nothing for you?”, “What self-hypnotizing social behavior have you noticed?” and “What do you do these days that gives you a sense of release?” Out of the answers, we've put together some of the destressing methods young people use now (with no guarantee that any of them work), including:

Some That Look Like They Might Work

1. Watch some ASMR

ASMR, which caught fire in 2016, was still Instagram's hottest niche trend in 2018. It simulates the sound of a haircut, an ear cleaning, someone eating. Watching or listening is said to trigger the ASMR effect, which then eases the viewer's anxiety and helps them fall asleep.

Chinese video sites are full of ASMR now, and a few clips are enough to show how strange the modern relaxation trigger has become: watching someone slice soap is destressing; watching someone knead slime is destressing; watching someone eat, or unbox a package, is destressing; even studying, through a screen, how a cat laps up water is destressing... Call it a new-era investigation of things to attain knowledge, in which the mountain is no longer a mountain.

2. Put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones

The three rules of the adult's built-in force field: an umbrella when it rains, sunglasses when the sun is out, headphones when it's neither. Music through noise-canceling headphones builds an atmosphere of “inside my own background music, nobody can beat me,” and to some extent it also cuts the social stress felt by people who dread noise, or who simply don't want to talk to anyone.

3. Watch a tacky video

2018 deserves to be called the year of tacky. Jokes, news items, videos and memes of every kind got tossed back and forth among internet users and became a shared source of joy — from “beautiful, and that's a warning,” the catchphrase of the bamboo-rat eaters, to “anything Brother Geng makes is junk,” which blew up on Kuaishou. Each in its unhinged way showed off a “realness” and a looseness unlike anything before: from chasing usefulness to accepting the usefulness of the useless, releasing people from caring too much about polish and efficiency. Call it a small escape from real life, or a moment of going blank inside it.

4. Grow a potted plant

Plants generally ask less of your housing and growing conditions than a pet does, and watering them every day is real, if modest, exercise. For the many young city dwellers living alone in what's been called an empty nest, caring for a small living thing not only eases loneliness — being surrounded by plants you raised yourself can also produce something close to the feeling of home. Even if you keep none, you can browse hashtags like #plantshelfie on Instagram to see how bloggers arrange theirs, and which varieties count as “influencer plants.”

We'll repeat our old advice, though: if you are a plant killer, do not start with succulents.

5. Repost a koi

“Repost this xxx and you'll get a promotion and a raise even after you botch a job.” Making or reposting these superstitious-looking memes lets you air your uncertainty and helplessness about the future while hinting, at exactly the right pitch, that “I may be down in the dumps, but I'm still keeping up with what's trending.” It suits the contemporary young person's chosen image, the “upbeat good-for-nothing,” perfectly.

If the face you usually show the world is the cool, rational type, though, the trick doesn't work: reposting one not only adds to the burden of the persona, it may also earn you a friendly “did someone hack your account?” from your friends.

6. Binge a “gratifying” drama

Qing palace heroine or fantasy cultivation epic, the “gratifying” drama — shuangju — has essentially no logic; it wins on high-voltage, crowd-pleasing plot beats alone, an outlet for the resentment people swallow in daily life. (Broadly speaking, videos selling “taking down the seat-hogger,” “tearing so-and-so apart” or “ripping a terrible movie” run the same play.) Put plainly, watching one is the same as browsing a porn site: the plot doesn't matter, only feeling good does.

7. Buy a 30-yuan free-shipping influencer toy

Shopping may really relieve stress. A paper published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2014 argues that making shopping choices helps restore a person's sense of control over their environment and reduces sadness. But other research holds that if you're shopping only to show off, or to fill something inside, the pleasure falls off a cliff and you end up with nothing but more boredom — and boredom and emptiness then drive you to acquire still more things to fill the gap.

If you truly can't keep your hands off the buy button, a middle path might be this: pick up a cheap, folk-wisdom-soaked toy of the moment — a head massager, a Peppa Pig watch, a mini drop-tower (and the giant Enter key deserves admiration too). It combines shopping with bad taste, and you can give one to an equally stressed colleague or friend to bond over. Cheap and effective.

Of course, opening a shopping app risks a slide into window shopping, and from there into being less happy than before. That risk still shouldn't be ignored.

8. Stick your hand in the rice jar and stir for a minute

Together with crushing instant noodles and snapping chocolate bars, one of the three cheapest destressing methods there are (though we don't recommend doing it in a supermarket).

Some That Probably Won't Work

9. Spend a whole day on housework, or on decluttering

You may have heard of procrastination housework, best represented by procrastibaking: fine, slow, and demanding your whole attention. By the same logic, some people organize their things, scrub the toilet, clean the house, even fold clothes on the shelves at a mall when the pressure gets high, hoping to relieve the fragmented anxiety and scattered attention of daily life. If you finish tidying and want to push on to decluttering proper, just open The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, Japan's “queen of housekeeping,” and follow along: the book lays out close to 100 ways to “regain a sense of control over your life by putting things in order.”

At first glance this looks like the perfect two-for-one, stress relief and a clean house at once. But we have to say: dodging the real task with housework isn't practical, since a deadline is a dead line no matter what. And if you're long used to the messy beauty of “as long as I know where things are,” with the added burden of deciding what to throw out and what to keep at every step, this famously laborious method may well leave you under more pressure, not less.

10. Try Hygge

Hygge comes from Danish; translated literally, it means something like “cozy and comfortable.” It is taken to be the core of Danish life — or, put another way, the “new middle-class life philosophy.” Some describe it as an attitude built on the keywords “handmade, natural, rustic,” meant to make you “feel the beauty of life.” Achieving hygge may require knitting a sweater (the more elegant term is “textile craft”), drinking tea (herbal tea or Pukka medicinal tea, to be precise), buying a set of flannel pajamas, wrapping up in a blanket (also not cheap) and eating a bowl of (comforting) oatmeal, among other activities. All told, it descends from the same line as the “effortless” and “Morandi” styles of the past two years.

And if you really do want to practice the Nordic way, this template for the good life comes as a set of three: Sweden's lagom principle, plus Japan's Okinawan life philosophy ikigai, plus Denmark's small-but-certain happiness, hygge. As for whether any of it works, honestly, you may want to ask your paycheck first.

11. Visit a destressing exhibit or a rage room

The offline version of a confessional; the extreme version of a cat café. The hooks are usually “venting room,” “plate-smashing room,” “pillow fight,” “beat up your boss,” and the activities amount to yelling, smashing a few plates, punching a sandbag. In Russia in 2016, an “anger room” called Debosh was reportedly in fashion: a few hundred dollars bought you the run of the place to smash walls, flip tables and wreck everything in sight, which amply satisfied what's called humanity's innate violence. Honestly, though, a rage room isn't any cheaper than wrecking your own home; the only difference is that someone else clears the debris. Which shows: destroying things relieves stress, tidying up relieves stress, but destroying things and then tidying up does not. The human mind really is a wonder.

12. Try adult swaddling, or a Zentai suit

Another Japanese invention. The first, Otona maki (おとなまき), was developed by the Japanese midwife and professor Nobuko Watanabe; as the name says, it wraps an adult in breathable cotton cloth, bundled like a rice dumpling, the way you would swaddle a baby. The practice began as a way to aid infants' physical development and calm them down (by mimicking the feeling of the womb), and has since won over plenty of adults, office workers especially. It's said to loosen adult stiffness, though whether today's young people, whose necks and lower backs are every bit as fragile, can take it is another matter. The second, “Zentai,” means a full-body skintight suit — here, wrapping yourself up like Spider-Man for an identity-erasing sense of being “abandoned by society.”

Neither is easy to understand. But from another angle it does explain why some people like to burrow head to toe under the quilt to sleep: that is the homemade, lazy version of adult swaddling or a Zentai suit.

13. Get a cat, a dog or a hamster

That pets are a standard destressing method goes without saying; it's on this list mainly to warn the eager crowd who so far keep pets only through a screen: don't be impulsive. A pet may cure the gloom of living alone, but it can also give you the bitterness of raising a child single-handed — a child, moreover, who never grows up.

And a Few We Don't Know Work, But We Wouldn't Mind If You Tried Them and Reported Back

14. Set your Moments to show only the last three days

This hides the fact that nobody is liking your posts, and gives new contacts the illusion that you're aloof and remote, successfully conjuring a “miss it and it's gone” air. Indispensable for relieving the stress of making friends.

15. Start an online chat, then end it yourself before the other person replies

Send a friend ten messages in a row. The thrust can be “I don't want to make this deck but it's due in three hours what do I do I'm circling the living room in a panic,” or “I just got on the scale, god, three more pounds, but we haven't tried this place yet, let's eat there first and diet after.” Then, while they're working out how to comfort you, add quickly: “never mind, just venting, don't worry about me, bye!” and delete the thread. That way, if you're the sort who always fears the other person won't reply, you've pulled off a complete, zero-burden conversation that you ended on your own terms.

16. Play a game, and the instant you accidentally feed a kill, type “???”

Same logic as the last one: pin it on your teammates immediately, and the stress of saving face dissolves without a trace.

17. Send your crush a message, then switch your phone off

A form of spiritual victory that gets you, psychologically at least, to the inner peace of “if you don't answer me, I won't answer you.” You can also run it in reverse: when the other person replies every half hour, wait ten times as long to reply yourself, giving them the stress of waiting while you display your indifference.

18. Polish a walnut

One of the easier props to pick up if you're nostalgic for an earlier era; there's a fair chance it will grant you an early, illusory taste of the retired-cadre life, rocking chair and iced cola included. Recommended for anyone who fancies himself a Shikamaru from Naruto. If you genuinely have no walnuts on hand, a couple of boiled eggs or a couple of tangyuan will do.

Cover and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya