High anxiety means big business

NEW YORK - Sarah Kugelman once suffered so much work-related stress her doctor told her to change her lifestyle or risk dying before 40.

Taking that advice, she launched a line of anti-stress skincare products as well - part of the booming so-called stress industry that experts say is worth more than US$11 billion ($17.2 billion) a year.

With overworked, overwrought consumers seeking cures ranging from aromatherapy to Zen meditation, the industry is predicted to grow to almost US$14 billion in the next two years.

Job-related stress alone affects as many as two in five workers at any given time and has caused one in five people to quit a job at some time in their career. Research shows it costs business US$300 billion a year.

"Like any type of problem, there's an industry around it, trying to solve it," said David Lee, an expert on workplace issues based in Bar Mills, Maine.

Consumers are trying lots of tactics to battle stress such as exercise, counselling, company wellness programmes, massage services, self-help books, spas, stress balls, potpourri and products from laundry detergent to bedroom slippers to oral sprays treated with scents designed to calm them down.

Even a mail solicitation for a popular celebrity magazine offers subscribers free issues that will make "your stress melt away".

"Everything marches under the name of stress," said Dr Paul Rosch, head of the American Institute of Stress in Yonkers, New York.

Kugelman said her anti-stress products, called skyn Iceland, were developed with a group of doctors and scientists to help battle the effects of stress on skin.

"A lot of people talk about stress relief but they're relieving stress with a lip gloss," she said. "There's not a lot of credibility in that.

"What's so hard about this business is there isn't a lot of regulation so it's possible to make claims that are not real."

Kugelman, who spent several years in the high-pressure world of marketing and product development at major cosmetics companies before founding her own company, believes such claims give the industry a bad name.

Rosch said it was hard to tell what worked, given that stress, or the lack thereof, could not really be measured.

"Stress is different for each of us and there's no stress reduction strategy that's a panacea," he said. "You can't say whether these things work or not.

"It's not really a science and a lot of it is commercially motivated."

Dr Alan Hirsch, neurological director of the Smell & Taste Research and Treatment Foundation in Chicago, said demand for anti-stress products and services was unrelenting.

"We've seen a spike after 9/11 because people are overall more anxious," Hirsch said. "People seek situations that reduce their degree of stress.

"One way of doing it is by using aromas, another way of doing it is eating comfort foods, another way of doing it is to drink alcohol or to seek psychological intervention. We're seeing all of these things increase."

Experts say what is also driving the stress industry is a population that is more affluent and self-reflective than earlier generations, and lives that are arguably more stressful.

"In the old days, to survive you had to be like a tug boat or a river barge," Lee said. "Now you need to be like a white-water kayak."

Angela Patmore says in her book, The Truth about Stress, that the industry creates its own demanding market. "What is actually wrong with people who say they're suffering from stress is they're really experiencing fear and anxiety," she said.

"This fear hasn't happened by accident. It's been deliberately engendered by the stress management industry itself, spreading what it calls stress awareness."

Patmore says that is harmful. "It's making them psychologically weaker, it's turning them into hypochondriacs and it's suggesting to them that quite normal emotions and normal psychological mechanisms are a sign of disease."

- REUTERS