photo: jetheriot
You know those stress balls, those squishy, doughy toys that you hold in the palm of your hand and squeeze? The idea is that they’re helpful tools for relieving stress, that squeezing them repeatedly is calming. Problem is, they don’t work.
Stress balls are also known as squeeze balls or relaxable balls. All of these terms – stress, squeeze, relaxable – refer to the compressible nature of the ball. A stress ball is a ball which can assume both a stressed and an unstressed state. A stress ball needn’t be spherical to be a stress ball – I own a hand-grenade-shaped stress ball, for example – but a stress ball must be compressible. It must be made of a squeezeable material, a resilient foam or polymer that can retain its shape even after multiple compressions. A typical stress ball can be compressed to half its unstressed size when the fingers of the hand close around it and squeeze it with maximal force. And the stress ball relaxes to assume its original form, ready to be squeezed again. To be made tense and to relax, over and over and over, that is the signature of the stress ball.
You’ll hear various theories about why they should work – they distract you, they stimulate your nerve endings in an acupunctural manner, sending positive flows of energy to your brain, they increase your circulation, boosting your body’s oxygen – and on an intuitive level, the idea is compelling: squeeze me hard enough and long enough, the stress ball says, and I’ll rid you of your built-up tension. These common-sense intuitions, however, aren’t backed up by any evidence. As far as solid science is concerned, a stress ball is nothing more than a spongy bauble, useful perhaps for strengthening muscles in a person with arm or hand weakness, or as an entertaining diversion, but not for alleviating stress. Indeed, not only are stress balls ineffective, they may also be counterproductive. Yes, stress balls may actually increase your level of stress.
The term stress as it has been applied to biology and psychology since the middle of the twentieth century was taken from the field of materials engineering. Stress was used to describe the way a deformable object redistributes its internal forces in response to external forces acting upon it, especially with regard to any potential for snapping into pieces or being permanently bent out of shape. The term seems tailor-made for psychology. Stress refers to the ability of the human animal to absorb and deform favorably or unfavorably in response to applied forces. It’s good to be able to rev up, for example, the rhythm of your heart. It’s good to be able to send blood surging through your body and your brain when you need it in a hurry. It’s good to be able to get your mind and your legs racing when you’re running away from danger. These are all good stress responses. But when you can’t turn it off, when you’ve kicked your system into high gear for so long you’ve run yourself ragged, it’s no longer doing you any good. Too much stress and you can get bent out of shape, even break apart into pieces.
Stress takes its toll on both the mind and the body. In other words, it takes its toll on the whole human being. The body is in a constant fight for survival, tensing its muscles, quickening its circulation, grinding the muscles of the neck into painful configurations, exhausting its physical stamina. The body crackles with nervous energy and purposeless movements – pacing, nail-biting, tossing and turning, gum-chewing, checking the screen of a smartphone every couple of minutes when nothing new is ever there. The body wants, no, needs something to do. The mind is also abuzz with pointless movements – obsessing, worrying, squandering attention. It’s as though the mind and the body are moving for the sake of movement, scattering life force around without a clear sense of purpose, spinning wheels yet failing to gain traction.
Humans are stress magnets. We don’t have to do anything and stress will find us. All we have to do is be alive. Traffic, cash flow, family, illness . . . stress is all around us. We’re swimming in a sea of stress. And like water to a school of fish, it’s so familiar we fail to recognize it. Stress, in a way, is comforting. We miss it when it’s gone. Silence and stillness have become so unnatural and frightening to us that we hang noisy screens on the walls of every restaurant. Music is always blaring. We’re so accustomed to stimulation we hardly ever notice. We rev and rev our engines.
Fortunately there is a way to counteract this malicious cycle, but you have to be clever enough to fool yourself. The trick is to use the body to lure the mind toward peacefulness. Consider the famous pencil experiment in which subjects were made to hold a pencil sideways in the mouth, either by biting down on it with their teeth so that their lips were pulled into the shape of a smile, or by holding it between their lips so that their lips were prevented from smiling. With the pencil held in one of these two positions, the subjects watched a movie with funny scenes. Those holding the pencil between their teeth with their lips in a smile position found the movie more enjoyable than did those holding the pencil so that their lips were prevented from smiling. Manipulation of the muscles of the lips through the positioning of a pencil in the mouth caused a corresponding emotion.
The mind is inseparable from the body, so the mind will follow where the body leads it. If this were not the case, if it were impossible to manipulate the body until it produced a new state of mind, massages wouldn’t be so popular. A purely physical act – muscle manipulation – confers a sense of well-being felt mentally. It’s as though the body shows the mind which way to go. Since the mind and the body are connected, the mind will follow where the body leads it, depending on how you manipulate it.
A change in the state of the body results in a change in the state of the mind since the two are yoked together, two aspects of the same creature. This is a useful idea. In general the mind is slippery, hard to get a handle on. If you tell your mind to be quiet, there’s a good chance it won’t listen to you. You have a better chance of working with your body. The material of your body is easier to sculpt than the material of your mind. If your body assumes a relaxed state, your mind will be nudged also toward relaxation. If you quiet your muscles, your mind assumes the quality of quieted muscles. If you surrender your tensions to the soothing broth of a bubble bath, your mind takes on the flavor of a bubble bath. Your body and your mind are unstressed, if only for a moment, and there is a sense of calm and clarity. Your muscles are relaxed and you feel resilient and imperturbable. Your mind is nimble and pliable. If you bring your body into an unstressed state, it will pull your mind along for the ride.
Notice that this is the opposite of what a stress ball would have you do. A stress ball asks you to increase your muscle tension, to make pointless movements repeatedly, tensing and un-tensing for no other purpose than to squeeze out a few moments of hand pleasure, to spin your body’s wheels, to do something instead of nothing, the opposite of relaxation. The art of counterbalance is to recognize when the teeter-totter is tipping to one side – in the direction of stress, for example – and to lean on the other side to restore a state of equilibrium. You don’t push the teeter-totter further in the direction of stress. You use the body as a lever to move the mind in the other direction. Stress is alleviated by quieting the movements of the body and the mind, not, as the stress ball demands, by tensing your muscles repeatedly. A stress ball is the opposite of a bubble bath.
The stress ball lures the human animal toward a state of stress. Just as the finest chocolate wears a promise of its mouth-feel in the luster of its color, a silkiness to hook the eyes and to tug the tongue, the surface of a stress ball is chewy with the promise of spongy goodness. It’s hard not to squeeze one when it’s around you. The foam-ball is seen before it’s felt, its contours projecting an airy aura of soft squeezeableness, practically begging to be squeezed. And who doesn’t want stress relief? Nobody doesn’t want stress relief. The bright toy draws the hands of human beings toward it like zinnias attract butterflies. And once we have our hands on a squeeze-toy, how can we not squeeze it? We squeeze it again and again. Nevermind that it accomplishes the exact opposite of what it promises, it’s easy and enjoyable to feel for the moment. A stress ball is an enjoyable lie. Even as we’re crushing our smiley-faced stress balls repeatedly, deforming the loose smiles into tight frowns again and again, even as we tense the muscles of our hands, we tell ourselves that stress is melting away. We think we can feel it working.
If stress balls are not for reducing stress, what are they? They’re brightly colored objects humans squeeze while pretending to be reducing stress and accomplishing the exact opposite. They’re human hand treats, delightful toys passed around from person to person, disguising their commercial purposes with promises of wellness. Stress balls make great promotional items because they’re inexpensive to manufacture and durable by design. They can be formed into any image, stamped with any logo. Who can resist such tempting advertisements? Few things will capture a person’s attention as well as a get-well-quick doo-dad. Squeeze me. Squeeze me. And remember – Adelphia Media Services. Squeeze me, I’m a little concrete mixer. Squeeze me, I’m shaped like a piggy-bank and my insides are gooey with cyber-gel. A stress ball is a malleable toy humans are seduced into squeezing. We always want to be doing something and stress balls are happy to oblige. Stress ball. The name literally asks you to apply stress to it. Stress ball. Stress the ball. It invites you to generate stress. If stress balls worked, they would reduce rather than produce stress.
This doesn’t mean that you should throw stress balls away or never use them. You just have to think about them in a different way. The only convincing argument I have heard about the effectiveness of stress balls – when used in the traditional sense – is the argument that they are useful distractions. The idea is that you use the stress ball to focus your mind, to clear it of the chaos swirling around it. If you could just focus on this ball and squeeze it, you will feel grounded. The point is well taken – distraction can be useful in the management of stress, but why should distraction consist of the repetitive and fruitless grasping of an object designed for the express purpose of making your muscles more rather than less tense. It’s wheel-spinning of a different form, but wheel-spinning nonetheless. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have distraction take a less counter-productive form? Instead of distracting you into a state of repetitive muscle tensing, a stress ball should distract you into the exact opposite state, a state of muscle un-tensing. Isn’t there enough squeezing going on in the world already? What if, instead of squeezing a stress ball, you refused to squeeze it? What if you carried it around with you and practiced resisting its seductiveness? Rather than succumbing to the stress ball’s temptations, what if you pointedly didn’t squeeze it? What if you referred to it as an un-stress ball from now on?
Somewhere along the way, it seems, we got the instructions backward. In terms of stress reduction, a stress ball is more effective when it is used as an un-stress ball, as a model to emulate rather than as an object to compress and stress. Tantric practitioners in ancient India were known to contemplate a statue of a goddess for days on end until by force of will they had captured somehow the vital essence of the goddess and incorporated Her into their beings. Do this with the un-stress ball. Become the un¬-stress ball. Hold it in your hand. Resist squeezing it. Make a point of not tightening your grip around it. Feel its near-weightlessness pressing barely against your palm. Be light, buoyant, resilient, bright and spongy. Rest it on your night-stand and be similarly relaxed. Do this over and over. When you’re stopped in traffic, instead of fidgeting with a radio that never delivers the satisfaction you’re looking for, loosen your fingers from the knob of the radio, loosen the tight muscles of your neck and your face and let your shoulders fall by your side with a cushiony lightness. Be the unsqueezed foam of the ball.