My jaw is currently a vise, a pressurized hinge of bone and muscle that refuses to acknowledge I am actually off the clock. I am standing in the center of the rug, looking at the television remote as if it were a complex detonator that might blow the entire evening if I press the wrong sequence of buttons. I have already walked to the kitchen and checked the fridge three times in the last 32 minutes. There is nothing new in there. The same jar of half-eaten olives, 2 cartons of almond milk that are nearing their expiration, and a stack of cheese that I am not even hungry for. I am not looking for food; I am looking for a distraction from the crushing weight of deciding how to properly relax. It is a specific, modern sickness-the cortisol-drenched pursuit of a low-cortisol state.
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The pursuit of relaxation has become a high-stakes task that actively generates cortisol.
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The Editor’s Abyss: Miles V.
Miles V. understands this better than most. Miles is a podcast transcript editor, a man who spends 42 hours a week staring at the jagged waveforms of human speech, surgically removing the ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ to create a fiction of perfect fluency. When he finishes his shift, his brain is a frayed wire. He told me once that the hardest part



