Stressful Living
Some stress is good, obviously. However, the term ‘stressful living’ in common usage does not refer to this kind of stress, but to the kind that is not beneficial. Although it is true that a large amount of, if not most, such stress is due to readily identifiable stressors, that can be categorized as chemical (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, etc.), environmental (noise, overcrowding, traffic, etc.), common social (family demands, relationship maintenance, etc.), punctuated social (bereavement, divorce, being a victim of crime, etc.), and various combinations of these and other potential categories (such as workplaces which may combine environmental with social), it is also true that a very significant amount of stress is caused by various forms of conscious and unconscious behavioral overhead. Such behavioral overhead occurs, by definition, when more efficient policies or practices are not implemented for whatever reason, usually for the sake of maintaining certain standards or due to the inertial resistance to change.
The proposals listed below will, both directly and indirectly, mitigate the stresses which contributes to ‘stressful living’. Many of these proposals, though their primary thrust may be elsewhere, will address ‘behavioral overhead’ stress which is often invisible and not mentioned in discussions of stress reduction strategies. In a way, all proposals on this website propose to fix a problem and, as such, are intended to reduce the degree of stress at least some individuals experience to at least some extent. But the line had to be drawn somewhere, so included on this page are only the more significant proposals that have the more obvious stress reduction consequences.
1. Public Policing of Published Materials
A great deal of stress is caused by acting upon false information. The prevalence of false information could be most effectively reduced through the use of incentivised public policing.
2. Defense & Sovereignty
One of the larger causes of stress worldwide is the control of one people by another. Sufficiently distinct people groups deserve to have their own independence. It is human nature to want to be ruled by your own people and there is nothing wrong with that. Independence gained by such people groups would result in the easing of tension (less terrorism, for example, and its associated pain and stress) within numerous societies around the world, naturally reducing the amount of stress experienced by those people.
3. Political Asylum & Enclave Creation for Persecuted Minorities
People seeking the right of asylum for whatever reason naturally are undergoing severe stress. Creating temporary locations closer to their original homes and simultaneously working to force a change to the original offending policies so that a fairly rapid return of asylum seekers is possible would be the correct way to deal with these situations.
4. Monetary Policy
Inflation and interest are some of the root causes of many economic and, by extension, social problems. These two economic realities in our current system act as a leech, skimming off a certain percentage of the value of economic activity and transferring this wealth to banks and other lenders. Fractional reserve banking coupled with the overly generous compensation for the risks assumed by lenders in return for the relatively little benefit they provide to society and the economic system, means that the net revenues generated by these transactions permanently flow much more heavily in one direction–from the poor to the rich. Relatively little makes its way (in any form) back to the less wealthy segments of society. In time, and absent any equivalently massive transfer of wealth system from the rich to the poor, societies tend to become bipolar, with a rich class, poor class, and ever shrinking middle class. Needless to say, such developments generate huge stresses on society.
5. Election System (Single-Winner & Multi-Winner)
Any form of government that is not sufficiently responsive to the will of the people or that does not lend a proportional ear to each of the various political interest groups within its population, is more unstable than it needs to be. Apathy, mistrust, disenfranchisement, demonstrations, riots, rebellion, and even civil war are products of such relationships. Our current ‘winner-take-all’ system of elections is not conducive for the creation of long-term social stability.
6. Consumer Research Database
The stress of choosing to buy and shopping around for an item results, in part, from not knowing enough about the specific features of the item, or about its reliability or complaint history, whether a particular vendor really has the best price, and many other variables. Having one centralized website, administered by the government with data supplied by the vendors, organized in a standardized format, and with mandated participation by all vendors, would result in a massively efficient market, enabling all past consumer information regarding any product to be easily researched by any prospective consumer. Currently, it is often necessary to research the reviews of many relatively low traffic websites with less than a proper statistical sampling of reviewers in order to gain a semblance of accurate data about a product. Providing a central repository of such information and then mandating its use, would be the pinnacle of a free market with an efficient exchange of information between all supply and demand elements.
7. Jury Reform
Gullible jurors are a very large source of stress for society in general and victims in particular because of their often faulty verdicts due of their general inability to process the often complicated information presented during trials, shallow background knowledge, susceptibility to manipulation by lawyer techniques, etc. Professional jurors trained in the field should replace our current system of calling random people.
8. Closing Legal Loopholes
Injustice, whether perceived or actual, is the source of stress for many, especially victims. Loopholes (a technical way of evading the consequences) are a big problem in any regulatory framework, but the degree to which they are used in the criminal justice system with impunity is revolting.
9. Costs of a Crime & Punitive Penalties
Victims of crime should be well compensated. Not just for direct losses, but for a multiple of the direct losses. They should also be compensated for the fright they endured during the commission of the crime. Such a policy would dramatically reduce the stress associated with the victimhood recovery cycle.
10. Finding Jobs
One of the largest stressors in a society is being unemployed and looking for work. This proposal attempts to make it easier to match workers with jobs, especially in the short term, to fill in the space between permanent jobs.
11. Operating Systems Must Come With Free Antivirus and Malware Protection
Everyone knows that computer problems are a significant source of stress. It is often computer viruses or other malicious programs that are at the root of such problems. Operating System (OS) authors should, as part of the sale of the OS, agree to provide whatever protection necessary to ensure that their OSs do not contribute to the general insecurity of the Internet. Currently, adequate antivirus program installations on most computers cannot be achieved due to the need for the end user to actively shop for and pay for such protection. The current state of computer immunization is equivalent to what human immunization against various diseases may have looked like if governments did not engage in massive educational campaigns and funding of immunization programs–diseases would be far more common among the population. It is estimated that one in seven computers worldwide have either disabled or non-existent antivirus protection. In addition, many others have improperly installed protections.
Requiring OS authors to provide antivirus protections will have two main benefits. First, the cost of each antivirus program will be lower because of economies of scale. Second, OS authors will be more encouraged to design their OSs in ways that outsmart various viruses or are immune to them. Another benefit may be that the OS authors themselves may be encouraged to professionally run and operate antivirus programs themselves to prevent the end user from messing it up.
A thoroughly immunized Internet should be deemed a public good and governments should mandate such a goal and even help fund it, if necessary. The Internet must be constructed in such a way that it would be possible to accurately identify each information packet’s original source and destination. Such policing nodes would offer the ultimate security precisely because this traceability would practically eliminate the potential for authors to inject malicious code into the Internet without eventually being found.
12. Product Pricing Court
The fair pricing of products would focus stress on where it should be: making products more competitive. Currently, it is sometimes the case that many other businesses are struggling to compete in a market because one or a few companies are pumping below-cost goods into that market, gaining an unfair advantage. As a result, workers suffer a needless amount of stress trying to make their products competitive, when, in fact, they may already be competitive, if it weren’t for price warping due to the unfair pricing practices of some market players.
13. 4-Day Work Week
Getting ready for and commuting one less day per week to work could reduce stress, even after accounting for the increased stress associated with working longer hours during the other 4 days.
14. Product Standardiztions
Standardizing more products would save everyone much time and effort (stress) when trying to find replacement parts or learning to use new products.
15. Logical Billing & Pay Cycles
Life would be easier if such cycles were simply monthly, running from the 1st of the month to the last. Why have cycles that end on the 13th or that begin on the 25th?
16. Prohibit Automatic Acceptance, Renewal & Extension of Contracts
These practices are the source of a significant amount of stress among consumers who need to go through a great deal of effort to reverse charges or suffer the consequences of not reading contracts closely enough.
17. Ban Tax Deductions, Credits, Exemptions, Pre-Tax Money & Other Tax Tricks
Knowing that people can dramatically reduce their tax liabilities using their knowledge about these loopholes or by hiring accountants specializing in finding such tax tricks make paying taxes much more stressful for the poor. The tax code should be simple enough so that gaming it is not possible.
18. Law of Logic
This proposal would minimize the stress associated with suffering injustices due to logical failures of current laws.
19. Violations of the Spirit of the Law
This proposal would minimize the stress associated with suffering injustices due to the failure of current laws to specifically cover circumstances that were clearly intended to be covered by the current laws.
20. Statute of Limitations
The stress associated with the expiration of statute of limitations rules can be alleviated by removing such rules. Claims should be allowed to be brought forth at any time after an event. Naturally, as time passes it would be harder to prove one’s case, but never should there be a blanket ban on bringing forth charges merely because a preset amount of time has lapsed.
21. Informants
By multiplying the police force using crowd sourced policing, far more crime could be prevented and recorded for future prosecution. The result, crime would be both immediately deterred and a higher rate of successful prosecutions would reduce crime in the long run. Naturally, the probability of suffering stress as a crime victim is reduced.
22. Catastrophic Single-Payer; Mandatory Routine Visits
Choosing an insurance, paying premiums, filing claims, and choosing doctors all contribute to the stress related to healthcare. Requiring virtually everyone to be part of the same pool, would reduce costs, on average, for everyone.
23. Voting for One Thing at a Time
Knowing that ‘rider’ legislation (often known as ‘pork-barrel’ spending) often passes in Congress using methods designed to bypass the simple majority vote, is repulsive and stressful considering that tax dollars are paying for it. Every distinct piece of legislation should be voted on separately.
24. Bill Introduction/Procedures/Final Resolution In Congress
This is a proposal designed to allow bills with more significant support to float up to the top of the agenda for a vote, but only after a sufficient amount of time has elapsed, without changing the bill, to allow all members to review the bill. Business should be conducted more efficiently and effective policy-making (i.e., problem-solving) should result, reducing the stress level of many people affected by such policy problems.
25. Voluntary Sterilization for Undesirable People
Having fewer people that require demanding services such as drug/alcohol rehabilitation, prison housing, mental therapy, etc., would naturally result in a lower stress level for society because of both the reduced negative activities that cause one to be a candidate for such services and because of the reduced social cost of providing those services. Prevention is always better than the cure, but the benefits of sterilization are unavoidably more difficult to convey because of the lack of objective, clear scientific data stating that the pregnancies prevented due to these sterilizations would have resulted in a certain number of individuals needing such services. Since we cannot run parallel universes to see what would happen under different policies, reliance upon statistics would need to suffice.
26. Widespread Use of Video Cameras
The fear and stress of being a victim of crime should be reduced with more cameras installed in public places. The deterrent effect of such cameras and the higher conviction rates as a result of information captured on them would make public spaces safer.
27. Victims Get Compensated Immediately
Crime victims shouldn’t have to suffer any permanent financial loss as a result of a crime. Whether the criminal is never found or whether the criminal is unable to pay shouldn’t matter from the victim’s perspective. The government failed in its responsibility to ensure a safe environment, so the government should assume the responsibility to compensate crime victims for their loss. The government should then get compensated by the criminal. Such a policy would help mitigate the stress and anger that could build up in crime victims.
28. Compensation for False Arrest & Conviction
Being falsely arrested or convicted is pretty bad. The government should generously compensate these victims for the trouble. Such a policy would help mitigate the stress and anger that could build up in these crime victims.
29. Arrests/Searches Based On Credit System
Allowing high credit rated police a freer hand when arresting or searching people or property, would make law enforcement more efficient and able to respond more quickly to changing information and situations. If the police capture the wrong guys, their credit rating would reflect that and this special authority would be revoked.
30. Government Funding of Elections
Some of the stress caused by the general population is due to the warping of the political process by various interest groups which are able to gain a disproportionate amount of positive influence over policies which affect them at the expense of interest groups which do not have as much money or other forms of influence over policymakers. Thus, these interest groups lacking influence suffer disproportionately negative effects than would otherwise be the case if policies were determined mainly by the pure numbers of people impacted by them. Public financing of political campaigns will help reduce the disproportionate influence of interest groups by virtually prohibiting all donations to political campaigns. In general, the connection between money and political influence is never quid pro quo, but the connection using statistical analysis is much clearer.
Public financing in conjunction with limiting the physical social interactions between policymakers and interest groups would be the ultimate basic framework upon which a fairer, truly representative government could rise.
31. Illegal Immigration Enforcement
Illegal immigrants depress the wages of the legal residents of the country. This results in goods and services that are cheaper than they would otherwise be without illegal immigrants and these lower costs provide a significant benefit to a large portion of the population. However, because the domestic fiscal multiplier effect (the total amount of domestic economic benefit gained through the recirculation of illegal immigrant dollars) of illegal immigrant spending within this country is often far lower than than that of legal residents (due to greater remittances to family overseas and because of their generally lower original wages). Looking at this big picture, the suppressed wages and fewer job opportunities caused by illegal immigrants outweigh the benefits arising from the reduced cost of the goods and services that they enable.
32. Immigration Limits
Immigrants, even those that have skills that are not sufficiently supplied domestically, result in the depression of wages for that market. Only for the rarest of skills could it be justifiable to import the needed skilled labor. A country like the United States which is so populous has a sufficiently large and diverse (in terms of skill offerings) population from which it could provide the needed skills, that any large scale immigration is not needed. It is easier to understand how importing skilled labor would make sense for smaller countries, given that their domestic markets would have a smaller population from which to draw labor candidates. Cutting the number of immigrants, even high-skilled ones, would result in a general increase in wages in those markets. These increased wages would naturally result in the creation of a greater domestic supply.
33. Foreign Worker Time Limits & Fees
Similar to the arguments provided in the point above, the presence of foreign workers tend to depress wages in that market. Imposing time limits on their stay would create barriers and inconveniences that would tend to decrease the appeal of working here while also decreasing the probability that they would become comfortable enough to stay and bring their families from overseas. At the same time, imposing foreign worker fees would both reduce the appeal of working here while countering the tendency of such workers to depress wages.
34. Tax Only Active Economic Activity
A great deal of stress and frustration results from having to pay taxes on things that are already owned and fully paid for, like property taxes on a house. Even if the total tax burden were to remain unchanged, eliminating taxes on passive economic activity while increasing them on active economic activity would result in a less painful method of taxation.
35. Adopt the Metric System
So much confusion and mental overhead is consumed by working with two different systems of measurement, that it should be easy to see how mandating the use of just one would be beneficial. Our dilemma is much more painful in light of the Metric system being wholly more logical than the English system (US Customary and/or Imperial measure). The costs to the US of being a non-metric or dual measurement use country have been poorly studies, but all available estimates describe the economic losses as staggering. We need to completely switch over to Metric, quit teaching the English systems in our schools and save all the frustration and time needed to understand this absurd system of measurement.
36. Adopt the 13-Month Calendar
It is often the case that people mistakenly refer to days of the month that do not correlate to the day of the week that they intended. For example, a mistaken reference to Friday, February 23 must either mean Friday the 22nd or Saturday the 23rd because Friday the 23rd doesn’t exist (in the referenced year). All of this confusion could be avoided by adopting this 13-month calendar in which every numbered day of the month would always be the same day of the week. The only significant negative associate with this adoption would be getting used to the odd number of months in every year. But the benefits would far outweigh this.
37. Allowable Days Off
Workers would not need to feel guilty about ‘calling in sick’ when they are really not sick. Responsible workers would arrange their off days to minimize disruptions for their employer.
38. Vaccinations
Ensuring that vaccinations continue to be enforced and that the public is educated about their benefits would go a long way towards continuing to prevent the suffering and associated stress that are caused by having the illness, caring for someone with it, or merely being an acquaintance of someone with a disease.
39. Antibiotic Usage
Dramatically reducing antibiotic usage is essential for the future well-being of humanity. Overuse is resulting in the inability to cure diseases. This will lead to a great deal of stress in the near future.
40. Abortions & Euthanasia
Aborting sufficiently defective pre-birth humans and euthanizing sufficiently defective post-birth humans would alleviate a lot of stress. Though abortions/euthanasia should never be an option for pure convenience (e.g., I wasn’t ready to have a baby), it does provide a form of healthcare that benefit all who are involved.
41. Junk Food Tax
Taxing junk food would decrease its consumption and cause a corresponding increase in the consumption of healthier foods which have been shown to decrease general stress levels.
42. Self-Paced Flexible Packaged Courses
Allowing students a thoroughly flexible study regime would naturally decrease their stress by not requiring them to juggle their schedules to accommodate rigid class times or test dates.
43. Honking the Horn
Way too many drivers honk the horn for invalid reasons. Enforcement of honking laws need to be increase and penalties need to be imposed for every offense. Too much stress is unnecessarily caused, not just for the drivers being honked at, but for everyone who is close enough to hear the horn. It just adds to the noise pollution of an area.
44. Noise Pollution Restrictions
Too much noise obviously causes stress. Noise regulations should be enforced and meaningful fines imposed for every offence. There is no justification for police giving only warnings to party organizers responsible for excessive noise generation during the regulated time.
45. Car Alarm Regulations
The noise that car alarms make are naturally designed to be stressful to some extent. However, an additional huge amount of stress is added because of the fact that the vast majority of the time, these sounding alarms are false alarms. People have become desensitized to them. Yet they add to the general noise pollution in our environment and are a significant source of stress.
46. Mass Transportation System Infrastructure Design
A comprehensive mass transportation system would alleviate the stress of people without independent modes of transportation. It may well alleviate some of the stress even of people who do have their own independent modes of transportation due to the very real possibility that a comprehensive mass transportation system would reduce the degree of dependence on their vehicles, or may actually eliminate their need for owning their vehicles due to the reliability and affordability of such a system.
47. Public Bicycle System
Making people incorporate exercise into their everyday activities would help with weight loss and encourage a generally healthy feeling, all of which lead to reduced stress.
48. Video Cameras Recording Roadway
Having video cameras in public and in vehicles recording roadways and other public places would lead to a reduced risk and crime and lead people to be less tense in public because of the knowledge that anything criminal that happens there would likely be caught on tape and successfully prosecuted.
49. Legal Gambling
The prevalence of problem gamblers would be reduced if the elements in this proposal are implemented. The associated stress on the individual problem gamblers themselves, and their family and friends would be reduced or eliminated through the prevention of such gamblers to waste such a large percentage of their wealth.
50. Mandatory Will Creation
Having these documents ready would save families lots of stress during times of bereavement by reducing the amount of time and energy needed to determine what to do with the body and possessions of the injured or dead family member.
51. Disclaimer Protection for the Elderly
Lots of stress associated with caring for the elderly could be avoided if the elderly could be protected from scams or unnecessary purchases by a blanket requirement that business with the elderly must be done though a designated or approved intermediary, most often could be a family member.
52. Prices: In Cost Per Unit
Requiring pricing of this sort would enable consumers to far more easily compare prices among variously sized packages.
53. Document Clarity/Simplification
The stress associated with trying to understand complex documents could be dramatically reduced by simply redesigning them. Private or public document design competitions could be held.
54. English Language Simplification
Cutting out so much of the unnecessary, complex English rules of spelling could reduce the amount of time spent teaching young children literacy. This way, more advanced information, mental behaviors and habits could be taught during their earlier years when it is so much easier for them to learn. Such needless stress would be reduced or eliminated.
55. Educating Proper Behavior During Emergencies
A society not gone wild during a civil emergency would obviously prevent a lot of stress for everyone.
56. US Emergency Response Force
Such a force would be able to quickly maintain or impose law and order in a society undergoing an emergency. Such order would reduce the amount of stress throughout the general population.
57. 24-Hour Time Should Be Standard
The confusion between am/pm when people speak of time could be avoided by switching over to 24-hour time.
58. Neighborhood Conflict Resolution Court
The goal of this proposal is to create a somewhat informal but legally binding court which is able to adjudicate minor neighborhood irritants quickly before being escalated to higher courts.
59. Labeling Requirement Threshold
Knowledge of a products potential side effects, contents or other qualities would go some way towards reducing the stress associated with ignorance. May also reduce the chances that some people would suffer stress resulting from discomforts associated with consuming or using such products.
60. Commission Payments, Referrals & Contingency Fees
These regulations would reduce the high pressure sales tactics and reduce the stress associated with purchasing something that wasn’t really needed.
61. Election Information For Voters
Part of reducing the stress induced by faulty government is to ensure that the voting population is well informed about the candidates and the issues. We could do this by creating a centralized website where voters could go to get all the relevant information they could possibly want about a candidate or issue.
62. Voting Procedures & Instructions
Another part of reducing the stress inducing by faulty government is, paradoxically, to tell voters not to vote when they are either not interested in the election or are not well informed. Ignorant voters are like people in positions of authority who do not know the subject over which they have that authority. Significant and lasting damage to the whole endeavor would be likely to occur.
63. Nod Instead of Shaking Hands
Shaking hands is one of the best ways to spread germs from one person to another, causing the spread of diseases The ultimate solution to this problem is to adopt, wholesale, an alternative method of greeting, congratulating, or confirming an agreement or bargain. Perhaps a simple nodding of the head or slight bow should be an acceptable substitute for shaking hands. If this practice were to occur, far fewer people would get sick and the stress associate with these illnesses would be far less.
64. Punishment Denominated Primarily In Terms of Money
Far too often, punishments meted out by the courts are prison or jail terms. However, such places should only be reserved, at most, for people who pose physical risks to other people or large risks to property. Virtually, all other legal offenders should be punished by just having monetary fines imposed upon them, releasing them back into society and making sure that they pay the fines. Putting non-violent criminals behind bars puts an undo stress not only on them (because they need to toughen up to survive the prison culture) but also upon society at large (because after they come out of prison, they could put their new-found or sharpened anti-social skills to use against the public).
65. Greater Penalties for Crimes Committed During Emergencies
Trying to keep law and order during times of emergencies is very hard to do. Often, only force or the threat of force is the only effective tool that will reliably work (at least for the short term, but enough to get through the emergency.
66. Pets for the Aged or Sick
It is well known that pets can often be used to calm and heal patients. Using this knowledge, a great deal of good could be done by creating the necessary infrastructures to enable virtually everyone who could benefit from this therapy to do so.
67. ‘Downsizing’ Speed Limit
Reducing the rate of layoffs from large companies would result in an overall lower intensity of stress among the workers as a group since they would not all be forced into unemployment at the same time.
68. Prohibit Prepayment Penalties
People should be free to pay back their debt as fast as possible. Prepayment penalties do not allow borrowers to dig themselves out from under debt as fast as would otherwise be the case.
69. Prescription Medicine Labeling
People should have a description of the problem any prescription medication is intended to address written right on the bottle. Oftentimes, elderly people forget what a particular medication is for and are frustrated by not easily being able to find out.
70. Honesty Contracts
Such contracts would go a long way towards reducing the anxiety of engaging in transactions where one party is relatively ignorant of the value of a possession.
71. Contracts Assume Non-Misrepresentation & Fraud Nullification Clause
Contracts should not need to state that misrepresentation is wrong or that fraud would nullify the contract. These things should just be assumed in all contracts.
72. Roadway Reflectors & Lighting
Making roads easier to drive on at night by placing more reflectors to mark key road elements, especially things like center lines, lane markings and shoulder lines. This would decrease the amount of attention overhead that is often necessary when driving in poor visibility conditions, thus making driving less stressful, safer, and reducing the potential for accident-induced stressful events.
73. Prices Should Include Tax
Requiring displayed price to include tax when possible (naturally catalogues and other ads that go to different jurisdictions having different tax rates couldn’t do this) would result in less mental overhead for consumers who try to estimate the tax in order to find out how much the item ‘really’ costs.
74. Punishment Must Include Education
Reducing the stress that society suffers as a result of crime in the long term requires that criminal become effectively rehabilitated. Therefore, part of the punishment for committing crimes should be to educate the criminal with whatever information would reduce the likelihood of another legal offense. This could include skills training, empathy education or any other type of knowledge transfer that would potentially benefit the criminal, and by extension, society, in the long run.
75. Volume/Treble Designs On Radios, TVs, Etc.
Often time, especially nearer the lower sound levels, the radio or TV sound controls do not allow for a fine adjustment of sound levels so that if someone in is sleeping in the next room, it is not possible to set the volume high enough for you to understand but low enough to not disturb the sleeper. The incremental adjustments allowed are too large in these lower ranges.
The capacity for more treble also seems to be lacking in many cases, especially on talk programs. When trying not to disturb sleeping occupants, further reducing the bass frequencies is essential. It is frustrating to not have that option built-in to such equipment.
76. Credit Checks Shouldn’t Affect Credit Score
People shouldn’t have to worry about mere credit checks negatively affecting their credit score. A credit check is just that–some organization checking the status of one’s credit. It doesn’t mean that the individual whose credit is checked did something to deserve a lower credit score. Obviously, if loans are made or other liabilities increase, then a lower credit score would be justifiable.
77. Restaurant Menus Should State Food/Price Ratios and Calorie Estimates
More accurately knowing the economic and caloric values of a purchased meal would help alleviate some of the stress associated with this ignorance. People who strive to get as much food as possible for the least cost would be able to determine their best economic option if provided this information.
78. Standardized Course Nomenclature
Students often suffer an unnecessary amount of stress trying to figure out if certain course offerings are equivalent at different educational institutions. This is a needless waste because courses, at least at the undergraduate level, should consist of easily classified subject matter that is fairly common enough to become agglomerated into a discreet descriptive title that should be the same across all educational institutions teaching that same subject.
79. Short-Term Intensive Workload
Just like short-term intensive exercise can make you feel better in the long run, short-term intensive stressful assignments could make a student, not only feel better and learn to handle stress better, but could also show that student just how much productive work can be accomplished in a very short time. The end result would be a reduced amount of stress because these ‘stress test’ exercises would counteract the natural gradual shrinkage of a student’s ‘comfortable’ stress envelope by periodically forcing the student to push the envelope into areas beyond this comfort zone. Such exercises enable the student to develop better coping methods and behavior, practice multitasking and prioritization skills, etc.
80. Public Speaking Class
Getting people to at least partially overcome their stressful fear of public speaking is very good thing. People often want to overcome these seemingly uncontrollable fears and these proposed speaking classes offer a way to do that.
81. Pay Tickets On the Spot
Often, the stressful thing about getting a ticket is to figure out how you need to pay it, where you need to go and the logistics of it all. It would be much easier if an option existed to pay your ticket right there on the spot and be done with all obligations related to it.
82. Apologies (or Something) Required
Criminals writing an apology or providing some other form of communication to the victims would tend to humanize both criminals and victims to each other, potentially causing an easing of tensions between the two.
83. Littering Penalties and Collection Strategies
Just viewing litter on the roadside, at the park or anywhere else is a source of some stress. A clean environment is always more pleasant than a dirty one.
84. Plastic Wheel Noise
Rolling trashcans with plastic wheels late at night over pavement (driveway, sidewalk, street, etc.) to the curb for pickup the next day when the neighborhood is quiet and you don’t want to disturb the neighbors is stressful. Because the plastic wheels seem to notify the entire neighborhood every time it rolls over a speck of sand or debris by generating a very loud crackle. Even during the day, such sounds generated from similar plastic wheels are annoying because it is so loud. Such wheels should be covered wth a layer of rubber or in some way designed to not make such loud sounds when rolling over paved surfaces.