In today’s economic environ-ment stress plays a major part in our everyday lives. As a society we live our lives at a very fast pace and expect everything immediately. We set unreasonable deadlines and constantly place ourselves under enormous pressure. The paradox is we are too stressed to worry about stress! However, unless we slow down and confront this increasing problem we could develop serious health issues.
Stress is the main cause of high levels of absenteeism, presenteeism, staff turnover and other issues such as unnecessary errors in working practices. Work related stress develops because a person is unable to cope with demands being placed on them by their employer.
Short periods of tension can be very beneficial to a person; it can sharpen their thinking, allowing them to become more proactive in their working day. In addition it can also heighten physical responses in situations where performance counts, such as business meetings and presentations.
However, prolonged periods of stress can become detrimental to our health and has been found to play a major role in many diseases of modern life from asthma, depres-sion and migraine f lares to heart attacks, cancer and diabetes. There-fore, stress likely accounts for more than half of the country’s health-related expenses.
Since Dame Carol Black indi-cated that more than £30m was being lost to UK PLC every year due to stress in the workplace, there has been an inf lux of com-panies providing stress awareness and management training. This training is diverse as stress man-agement companies provide it in many forms from standard med-itation to sports therapy all the way to the esoteric such as primal screaming and equestrian therapy.
A lot of these companies are pro-viding technologies that make sense in their own way and in many cases are justifiable outside of any form of stress reduction. However, knowl-edge is not power.
Stressful situations
Power is the ability to apply that knowledge and generate results. For any employee who has experienced stressful situations it must first be understood this is a subjective expe-rience based on their own situation and as such, their ability to cope will also be individual.
So whether they have been shown how to breathe properly or how to relax, the ability for someone to react when they are in that state or to be able to identify the onset of stress and proactively be able to use a prior learnt technique is based on their ability to change.
Change is difficult but once an individual understands how they process their environment and how that in turn changes their state, they can open up the ability to take a more proactive role in deciding how they want to feel. The key to managing our stress depends on how we react to it. It’s our body’s way of telling us something is wrong (fight or flight). By recognising the symptoms of stress and arming ourselves with the tools to combat stress we will enable ourselves to live a more pro-active, productive and efficient lifestyle.
