Do you suffer from low energy? Or lack of sleep? Or is social apathy a bigger blight on your life? Maybe you are prone to headaches? Perhaps it’s living in a state of persistent anxiety that best sums you up?
Should four (or more) of the above strike a particular chord with you, then you – like millions of others – could be suffering from one of the Silent Killers of Our Age, one that annually tots up more victims than Ebola, cancer and road rage combined – stress. It’s a seemingly incongruous six-letter word, yet it’s terrifyingly ubiquitous.
A 2016 survey conducted by Regus, an international provider of serviced office facilities, revealed that 6 out of 10 workers worldwide showed signs of stress. The survey also suggested that heightened stress is directly costing world economies billions of dollars in lost productivity – never mind the toll it is taking on individuals.
Alarmingly, Regus also identified China as the country where employees have to contend with the highest level of stress, with 86% of mainland respondents maintaining that pressure in the workplace was on the up. There’s little comfort for Hongkongers as well, with the same survey indicating that 66% of the city’s professionals have a less than satisfactory work-life balance.
Neither can any of these be dismissed as rogue statistics. A separate 2016 survey – this time by UBS, a Swiss investment bank – showed that, out of 71 cities across the world, staff in Hong Kong spent the most time in the office. While the average working week in Paris was just 30.84 hours, Hongkongers notched up 50.11, easily outpacing second-ranked Mumbai, where workers clock in for a comparatively leisurely 43.78 hours.
One of the reasons why Hong Kong ranks near the top of so many of the world’s tensest towns’ lists is because it’s one of the few jurisdictions where work-related stress is entirely exempt from any municipal oversight. Only one exceedingly vague obligation to ‘ensure the health and safety of employees’ – troubles Hong Kong’s work-related legislation. Tellingly, Hong Kong’s Disability Discrimination Ordinance does not even list ‘work stress’ as a potential consideration.
Explaining just how work stress has come to be seen as the norm in the city, Dr Au Yeung Kwok-leung, a Hong Kong-based psychiatrist, says: “It’s not uncommon for many of my patients to routinely work more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. You might think that sounds ridiculous, but in an environment where everyone has the same workload and everyone puts in a 12-hour shift, it becomes normalised.”
While Hong Kong, in general, is blessed with more stress per square inch than virtually any other metropolis, nowhere is this more evident than in the finance sector. While its banks seldom stint when it comes to remuneration, neither do they stint in terms of employee expectations, with high targets and long hours pretty much de rigueur.
Sadly, these are not burdens everyone can bear. One bank employee who paid the ultimate price was 33-year-old Dennis Li Jun-jie, who plunged to his death after leaping from the roof of Chater House, the 30-storey building where he had been employed by investment bank JP Morgan. With his death later ruled to be due to work-related stress, his employers subsequently decided against going ahead with a previously planned sculpture of a stranger preparing to jump that had earlier – somewhat bizarrely – been given the go-ahead to be mounted on their roof.
Explaining why some individuals seem to have a lower tolerance to stress, Dr Jackie Fu Chi-kin, a Kowloon-based psychiatrist, says: “Resistance to stress is like resistance to bacteria – everyone has a different level of immunity. At a certain point, though, it always begins to affect your state of mind.”
As well as with individuals, the level of stress tolerance also seems to vary in line with certain demographics. According to the latest 360° Well-being Index, maintained by health insurance company Cigna, millenials cope less well with pressure than those in other age groups. While 26% of millennials claimed to experience “unmanageable stress”, only 11% of those aged 50 or above made a similar claim. There may be more to this claim made by millenials than just affectation. On an international basis, today’s 18-to-34-year olds earn up to 20% less in real terms than the previous generation did at the same age. At the same time, while 70% of Hong Kong’s millennials aspire to own their own home, only 5% have achieved this, compared to a global average of 15%.
Perhaps more alarmingly still, if we come a little further down the age ranges, some 60% of Hong Kong’s primary school pupils have apparently suffered from academic-performance-related stress. As a sign of the seriousness of this, since 2010, the number of school children committing suicide every year has averaged out at around 23, according to the figures from HKU’s Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention.
As a final thought, stress dates back to the fight or flight triggers that saw our ancestors sense it was time to scarper when something with a thick hide, sharp teeth and a big appetite was in their immediate vicinity. Today, it fulfils pretty much the same function but, instead of prompting fight or flight, it’s a wake-up call that there is something very wrong with your lifestyle.
Text: Suchetana Mukhopadhyay