Commuting is stressful: official

An HP survey - the actual point of which remains unclear - has deduced that commuting is stressful and therefore bad for you, Making Money reports.

Stress levels of guinea pigs* whose blood pressure and heart rate were monitored as they faced the daily scrum, and found to be higher than those "experienced by fighter pilots going into combat and police officers facing rioting mobs". While this will come as no surprise at all to the millions of miserable Brits who have tolerated the UK's diabolical transport system for years, there is one new factoid to be gleaned from the experiment: even short-term exposure to the rail network can cause "Commuter Amnesia".

According to psychologist Dr David Lewis, this is a total shutdown of the victim's brain as part of a psychological defence mechanism. He explains: "People suffering from even small levels of stress and discomfort during their journey will experience Commuter Amnesia and unless something remarkable occurs they will remember absolutely nothing about their journey."

This makes sense, although we're disappointed that the study did not identify that other stress-induced phenomenon - Commuter Apoplexy. While this is not as common as Commuter Amnesia (this being Blighty and all, stiff upper lip, worse things happen at sea, etc, etc), this writer can personally confirm that - during a journey to London which normally takes one hour - the decision by the operator to send out a particularly obstreperous ticket inspector after two hours stationary somewhere in the wilds of Essex certainly snapped us all out of our Commuter Amnesia.

At this point we would normally point readers in the direction of the product or service which the report sponsor considers a solution to the highlighted problem. Sadly, we cannot say which printer might possibly cast a ray of sunshine into the stygian gloom of commuters' lives - either because it is not stated or because we have blanked the whole thing as a result of simply being reminded about commuting. We apologise. ®

Bootnote

*Human ones, obviously - no sarky emails.

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