It started innocently enough. Daily life was training our nerves, and we were running on fumes—of energy and psychological endurance. We processed stimuli while inhaling 10,000 liters of air a day, as nerve impulses rushed through us at 350 km/h. Then the world trembled with a faint pulse—yet the tension hadn’t yet ignited our muscles, and breath was still uncounted. Until came the clenched jaw, the inability to take a full breath, micro-shaking hands, sweating, a twitching nerve in the eye. Hysteria? Or perhaps simply a systemic overload?

Artists don’t waste their pain—they examine ways of existing within a reality of overstimulation, controlled productivity, and unspoken anxiety, essentially in the face of everything. Stress Hygiene is a story about survival strategies in a world of chronic tension.

As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”*, especially in a reality that leaves no space to breathe. Stress Hygiene not only diagnoses the overload, but subtly points to strategies that escape the logic of the system: withdrawal, tenderness, attentiveness. Sleep, relinquishing excess, turning inward—this is not escapism, but resistance in its purest, if least spectacular, form.

*Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: and Other Essays, Ixia Press, New York, 2017, p. 130. First published in 1988.