Bill went to this session at the last SHARE, and he recommended it to me. Now stress management classes have become ubiquitous over the years, and I have managed to avoid every one that has come my way. My feeling was that since I didn't have ulcers, I must be doing something right.

The first thing the speaker did was distribute a self examination - you know, the sort of test you'd find in Reader's Digest - to determine how much stress we carry amongst the other mental baggage. I did fairly well, but the test revealed a few things I have to watch for.

A little stress is good for your performance. When you go from no-stress to a moderate amount of stress your performance improves considerably. But at some point additional stress degrades your performance, and your ability to deal with it declines rapidly after about age 45 (plus-or-minus 4 years).

There is such a thing as positive stress, examples of which are kissing or skydiving ("though why anybody would want to get out of a perfectly good airplane is beyond me"). But most stress is bad; it raises the cholesterol level and drops the white count. And it is insidious, it'll get you when you aren't looking. The speaker's best quote was: "Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down".