Joel Snape’s article (What does stress really do to our bodies, 17 May) was informative regarding the physiology of stress, yet narrow in articulating the broader drivers of chronic stress in modern life. The piece frames stress largely through everyday frictions: hectic school runs, online arguments, forgotten shoes, driving fines and doomscrolling. It then suggests that stress management is primarily an individual regulatory issue: breathing patterns, rumination, resilience, therapy, exercise and self-care.
Yet much contemporary stress is not driven simply by low-level everyday frictions. It is produced by aspects of modern life that have become psychologically corrosive: social atomisation, economic precarity, platform logic, transactional systems and the erosion of communal life.
