In Tune: Queen and Bowie would have a thing or two to say about First World stress

I've been a journalist for almost a decade, and statistics - not to mention personal experience - dictate that I experience a lot of stress.

There's the constant pressure of deadlines, the threat of financial ruin and irrelevance that haunts pretty much every newsroom in the country and the tendency of readers to treat social-media channels as superhighways for caustic, unending criticism.

Casey Phillips

Yet journalists aren't even the most worry-ridden Americans, according to Forbes' 2016 list of the most nerve-wracking careers in the U.S. Instead, that honor belongs - understandably - to active military personnel, followed by firefighters and airline pilots.

At No. 9, newspaper reporters barely made the cut. Even event coordinators (No. 5) apparently are more justified in sweating bullets.

In truth, though, the more you look into it, the more you realize how unjustified our worries are most of the time.

There's a - probably ethnocentric - tendency to think of stress as a Western phenomena, but a Bloomberg report suggests otherwise. In 2013, the magazine compiled a list of the world's most-stressed out countries based on a number of statistics, including income inequality, gross domestic product, homicide rate, pollution, corruption, unemployment and life expectancy.

Only countries with measurable metrics for all seven categories were considered. Of the 74 that qualified, the U.S. ranked 54th overall, with a stress "score" of just 25.7 (higher being more justifiably stressed out).

If you really want to feel the pressure, move to Nigeria or South Africa, which top the list with scores of 70.1 and 70, respectively. In fact, countries typically thought of as Western - namely the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and members of the European Union - don't even enter the list until Greece (No. 30), which scored 41.8.

By comparison, life in the West is laughably cushy and easygoing. There's a reason, after all, that people dismiss disgruntled tweets about malfunctioning smartphones and blasé lattes at Starbucks as "First World problems."

I don't know about you, but reading about how good we actually have it compared to some places has unraveled the perennial knot in my stomach and replaced it with a blush of shame.

The next time you're feeling stressed, stop and consider how much worse things could be. Think of the folks in Nigeria, channel the wisdom of Queen and Bowie's "Under Pressure" and remember: "Love dares you to care for / the people on the edge of the night / and love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves."

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.