It is a familiar scene these days: employees taking newly laid-off co-workers out for a drink for comfort. But which side deserves more sympathy，the jobless or the still employed？On March 6，researchers at a conference at the University of Cambridge suggested it was the latter.

Brendan Burchell，a Cambridge sociologist，presented his analysis based on various surveys conducted across Europe. The data suggest that employed people who feel insecure in their jobs show similar levels of anxiety and depression as those who are unemployed. Although a newly jobless person's mental health may“bottom out”after about six months，and then may even begin to improve，the mental state of people who are continuously worried about losing their own job“just continues to get worse and worse”, Burchell says.

Psychologists support this theory by arguing that human beings feel more stressed during times of insecurity because they sense an immediate but invisible threat. Patients have been known to experience higher levels of anxiety, for example, while waiting for examination results than knowing what they are suffering from—even if the results are cancer. It's better to get the bad news and start doing something about it rather than wait with anxiety.  When the uncertainty continues, people stay in a nonstop“fight or flight”response, which leads to damaging stress.

But not every employee in insecure industries has such a discouraging view, Burchell says. In general, women get on better. While reporting higher levels of anxiety than men when directly questioned, women score lower in stress on the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, even when they have a job they feel insecure about losing.  As Burchell explains,“For women, most studies show that any job—it doesn't matter whether it is secure or insecure—gives psychological improvement over unemployment.”He supposes that the difference in men is that they tend to feel pressure not only to be employed, but also to be the primary breadwinners, and that more of a man's self-worth depends on his job.

   As the pace of life continues to increase, we are fast losing the art of relaxation. _______ you are in the habit of rushing through life, being on the go（忙碌）from morning till night, it is hard to _______. But relaxation is _______ for a healthy mind and body.

Stress is a（n）_______ part of everyday life and there is no way to _______ it. In fact, it is not the bad thing that it is often supposed to be. A _______ amount of stress is important to provide motivation and give _______ to life. It is only when stress gets out of control that it can lead to poor performance and _______ health.

The amount of stress a person can bear _______ very much on the individual. Some people are not afraid of stress, and such a ________ is obviously chief material for managerial responsibilities. Others lose heart at the ________ of unusual difficulties. When exposed to stress, in whatever form, we ________ both chemically and physically. In fact we make a choice between ________ and fight. And in more ancient days the choices made the ________ between life and death. The crises we meet today are ________ to be so extreme, but however little the stress, it requires the same response. It is when such a reaction ________ long, through continued exposure to stress, that health becomes ________. Such serious conditions as high blood pressure and heart disease have ________ links with stress. Since we cannot ________ stress from our lives we need to find ways to ________ it.

So what do you think of stress? What is your way to deal with it?