Society

Stressed out workers reach for pillows

(China Daily/CRIENGLISH.com)
Updated: 2007-01-22 16:30

Hundreds of young white-collar workers have fun at a pillow fight held in Shanghai over the weekend. Although the game is popular in the West, most participants played it for the first time. They admitted the three-hour fighting did help relieve pressures.
[Photo: album.eastday.com]

This is a tale of Chinese people haunted by cutthroat pressure in their drive for survival and progress. To release the tension, they resort to a kind of violence.

Last Saturday was a wild, sleepless night for a flock of Shanghainese who were locked in combat. But there weren't the conventional two sides, nor were there any warfare tactics.

White-collar workers let off steam during a pillow fight last Saturday night at a bar in Shanghai. Some 100 young workers took part in the battle. Yang Lei

And the only weapons were pillows.

Organized by a dating website, this pillow fight brought together nearly 120 white-collar urbanites, aged 25 to 35, seeking a break from their mental stress with the outside chance of landing a sweet spouse, wrote Shanghai Youth Daily.

"We borrowed the idea of a pillow fight from the West as a way to ease mounting pressure facing lots of white-collar workers in Shanghai," one of the organizers said. "By throwing pillow punches at one another, they may get relief from stress, however temporary it may be."

Luo Xia, an office worker in her late 20s, was exhausted after the fight.

"It drove me high and helped me free myself from unbearable strain and a heavy workload," she said. "I just feel as if I'm returning to my carefree childhood with this soft violence."

But physiology experts at East China Normal University in Shanghai think otherwise.

Warning of a possible dependence on this "drinking poison to quench their thirst" release game, experts said it surely cannot give inner peace to people plagued by mental stress. Even worse, this type of release may weaken their inherent ability to fine-tune the mind.

More than 26 million Chinese suffer from depression, according to the China Association of Mental Health.

Every year, 280,000 people kill themselves in China, and 2 million fail in their attempt to do so.

Psychologists suggest going sightseeing, chatting with friends, singing loudly, doing exercise and so on.

Maybe the boldest alternative to reduce stress, pole-dancing has emerged among young female office workers in Beijing, the Beijing Morning Post reported.

Easily associated with bustling nightclubs and dazzling lap dances, these pole dances are tamer renovated to be nothing more than a "fancy" exercise for both pressure release and body shaping, said Luo Lan, a pole-dancing coach at a Beijing body exercise club.

"Most of our members are office ladies aged from 20 to 30," Luo said. "They take to pole-dancing as a novelty, even a new trend."