Stress costs your company far too much
T.L.C. Stress Management can help you to overcome these problems

Suffering from work stress?

Lets be clear about this, we all have stress in our working lives. Eight out of ten executives in South Africa suffer from stress related problems; and seven out of the eight deny it! We think stress is an occupational hazard that we must endure in our business world but this is not true. Stress itself is not addictive but one of the side effects is, and therein lies a problem... we get addicted to the adrenalin rush. Adrenalin is addictive. If you're not sure if you are addicted — take a two week holiday. The first weekend will be fine, but come Monday morning, you start to wonder if the office is managing without you, you remember that letter that must go off or the customer who was not happy on Friday. Daily 'high' By 11am that morning, you can’t resist and you slip out the back to ring the office. Of course you justify it by telling yourself that you are indispensable, but what you are really missing is your daily “high”, and that daily high is probably reducing your life expectancy. Many studies have conclusively shown that stress is a killer. Stress is not only linked to heart related problems (the second biggest killer in South Africa after HIV/Aids), but also digestive problems like ulcers and IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), and some studies link stress with cancer. In addition, stress reduces your immune system, leaving you defenceless against all the other bugs that are going about. Not sure whether stress is taking hold of your life? You just have to listen to your body. Do you ever get chest pains you can’t account for? Does your thinking become muddled sometimes or are you finding it hard to concentrate? What about decisions; are they harder to make sometimes? Do you tire easily? Need to sleep? Sometimes people under stress will struggle to sleep while others need eight hours a day and still wake up tired in the morning. Some people will eat more under stress and gain weight while others stop eating and lose their weight. If you are a smoker, you will smoke more and drinkers begin to rely too heavily on their daily dose. As a manager, you will have to consider your team’s stress situation. Blue collar stress is just a common as white collar stress and just a likely to disrupt the workplace. So what’s to be done? The first thing to understand when managing stress is that we are not looking for a stress-free life. Stress is a good thing in small doses. We tend to perform better under stress as all sports people know. So we don’t want to get rid of stress — just manage it before it manages us. Another approach to stress Once we begin to notice the symptoms, we tend to rush off to the doctor for a pill that will solve the problem. Far too often we end up with a pill to keep us going during the day and another one to put us to sleep at night, one to slow down our heart rate and another to manage the side effects of the first three, and many of these pills are addictive in themselves. Of course if you are prescribed pills, you must take them... but perhaps consider trying another approach to managing stress, one that can be far more effective. There are six types of stress; work related, fear, emotional, environmental, biological and anxiety. The bad news is that stress is cumulative. So if you have a difficult working environment where you have poor relationships with your colleagues, but you also eat badly and are not physically fit these will all go together to create stress problems. Once you understand that stress is cumulative, then you are half-way to solving the problem. If stress is cumulative, then the solution is also cumulative. Improve relationships Have a look at your lifestyle under each of the stress factors I have mentioned above. You may not be able to change your job to reduce your stress but you can improve your relationships at home with your spouse or teenage children perhaps (just sitting down with them and talking to them openly and honestly like adults will work well). Have a look at your diet. You know what you should be eating; your body is telling you all the time. Then get out your old running gear and start to jog again. We don’t all have to be Comrades Marathon runners, but 20 minutes running up and down stairs will do the trick (even if you start with five minutes and build up from there). Have a look at your environment at work. Is your chair well designed or is it getting just a little old. Are the lights in your office appropriate? (If you have strip lights that are not covered in your office, you will probably go home with a headache each night). Have a look at your financial plan Sit down with your partner once a month and look at your financial plan. Money can so often be the cause of stress but a good financial plan may well just solve this for you. If you are not sure how to do it, have a chat with your bank manager, they will be delighted to help you and in most cases they will do it for free. Take a break! Most people have a lunch break but only do one of those things. They have lunch, but they don’t have a break. Get out of the office at lunch time and sit in the park or even listen to your favourite music in your car. You don’t need to take an hour... 15 minutes will do. Take the holidays you are entitled to and add to that a few weekends away with your family. If you think that may even be more stressful, then have another look at your life. You may not be able to do all of these things but we can all make a start. By incorporating just one or two of the above suggestions, you will have reduced your stress factor considerably and by doing so increased your life expectancy.

Richard Mulvey Business.iafrica.com 16th March 07