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Health Devotional
Fighting the Civilized War
Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest." Mark 6:31, NIV.
As long ago as the Civil War people were aware of it. Back then palpitations of the heart were so common among military troops that the condition became known as "soldier's heart."
During World War I a crippling anxiety developed among soldiers. Physicians referred to it as "shell shock" because they thought it to be caused by heavy artillery.
By the time World War II came along, the symptoms were called "battle fatigue." Then veterans of the Vietnam War experienced "post-traumatic stress disorder."
We now know that all of these illnesses had a single cause. The soldiers succumbed to a constant barrage of stressful combat episodes. They could find no rest, no renewal. And in this unending fight-or-flight environment, their reserve systems eventually collapsed.
But you're not in a war—or are you? Chances are you're involved in never-ending battles with job pressures, finances, and family problems. If you sometimes want to run away from it all, you're a casualty of the modern "civilized" war.
Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock describes this civilized war as "the distress both physical and psychological that arises from an overload of . . . adaptive systems and decision-making processes. Put more simply, [it] is the human response to overstimulation."
Overstimulation equals overload. It's estimated that we are subjected to 100 times more stressors than were our grandparents. Toffler insists that the civilized war exposes us to too much input in three areas:
As long ago as the Civil War people were aware of it. Back then palpitations of the heart were so common among military troops that the condition became known as "soldier's heart."
During World War I a crippling anxiety developed among soldiers. Physicians referred to it as "shell shock" because they thought it to be caused by heavy artillery.
By the time World War II came along, the symptoms were called "battle fatigue." Then veterans of the Vietnam War experienced "post-traumatic stress disorder."
We now know that all of these illnesses had a single cause. The soldiers succumbed to a constant barrage of stressful combat episodes. They could find no rest, no renewal. And in this unending fight-or-flight environment, their reserve systems eventually collapsed.
But you're not in a war—or are you? Chances are you're involved in never-ending battles with job pressures, finances, and family problems. If you sometimes want to run away from it all, you're a casualty of the modern "civilized" war.
Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock describes this civilized war as "the distress both physical and psychological that arises from an overload of . . . adaptive systems and decision-making processes. Put more simply, [it] is the human response to overstimulation."
Overstimulation equals overload. It's estimated that we are subjected to 100 times more stressors than were our grandparents. Toffler insists that the civilized war exposes us to too much input in three areas:
- Sensory overload. The human body responds to noise as it does to fear and anger. Even pleasant sounds at too high a volume can trigger a fight-or-flight response in us, and since World War II noise levels in the United States have increased 32-fold.
- Informational overload. We live in the midst of an informational explosion, bombarding us with jangling telephones, daily newspapers, weekly magazines, home entertainment units, AM-FM radios, paperback books, monthly magazines, and home computers.
- Decisional overload. Toffler suggests we are assaulted with a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day!
Used by permission of Health Ministries, North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists.
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