STACKED ODDS, STRETCHED MINDS: THE NEW BASELINE?

PSYCHOLOGIST AND AUTHOR AARTI C RAJARATNAM TELLS NIKHIL ABHISHEK HOW YOUTH STRESS BUILDS THROUGH STACKED PRESSURES, CONSTANT ALERTNESS, AND LOW DOWNTIME, UNTIL SETBACKS FEEL DECISIVE

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In today's world, a student or young professional can do everything right and still feel the body bracing for impact.

For many of them, stress no longer arrives as a sharp moment. It settles in the background and stays there. It accumulates, interacts, and amplifies itself until the load feels continuous. There is always another test or meeting to prepare for, a message to reply to, a family expectation to manage, a future to worry about, and a feed that never stops refreshing. While nothing is catastrophic, the pressure behaves like a setting.

This is the stress stack pressures that would be manageable alone, piling up and feeding off one another. When the stack gets tall enough, the body stays braced even on ordinary days. This can dull enthusiasm, shape choices, and alter even simple routines like sleeping, eating, or showing up for class or work.

Psychologist and bestselling author Aarti C Rajaratnam, who has worked closely with adolescents and young adults for over two decades, regularly watches this pattern play out across individuals who appear to have very different lives on the outside and yet describe a similar sense of heaviness.

She begins by restoring the word “stress” to its proper scale and drawing a line between pressure that motivates and pressure that corrodes.