Who cares if you're stressed?

Words: 708 Reading time: 2 minutes 22 seconds

The Health & Safety Executive have published figures showing that 6.7 million working days are lost each year due to the effects of stress. The cost to society is estimated to be in the region of £3.8 billion.

Stress is believed to be responsible for up to 40 per cent of all absences from work and can reduce employee performance by up to 70 per cent.

Now we have more labour-saving devices than at any time since the world began, why is it that?

When I ask ‘What is stress?’ I get different answers.

One set of answers is a list of symptoms, some of which are emotional, such as feeling irritable, frustration at having to wait for something, barely suppressed anger, generally feeling upset, lack of sense of humour, etc.

Other symptoms listed are physical, such as muscle tension, neck or shoulder pain, stomach upsets, 'pounding' or 'racing' heart, sweaty palms, 'butterflies', insomnia or excessive sleep, shortness of breath, etc.

Another set of answers list what people see as possible causes, such as job insecurity, heavy workload, infrequent rest breaks, poor communication in the organization, crowding, noise, insufficient leisure time, etc.

A third set of answers merely uses synonyms for stress, such as anxiety, hassle, pressure, strain, tension, worry.

But none of these actually tells me what stress is.

Aching joints and a runny nose might tell me I have influenza, but it is not influenza itself. Getting soaked in a downpour might make me susceptible to influenza, but it does not cause influenza. As we all now know, the true cause is viral.

So, what single root cause covers all of the above factors and manifestations of stress? What is the equivalent of the viral or bacterial agent where stress is concerned?

My suggestion is that stress only occurs when the situation, as we perceive it, demands more resources than we believe we have available at present to resolve it

Situation > Resources

As far as I can see that definition covers all cases and it helps by providing four different avenues of escape:

The situation can be avoid, vacated or mitigated.

Our perception of the situation can be revised, or reframed.

The resources required can be augmented, assembled, bought or borrowed.

Our beliefs about our resources can be challenged, replaced or adapted.

The other important point about this definition is that underlines the part played by perceptions and beliefs in the whole subject of stress. That is not to dismiss or denigrate the trauma reported by those experiencing stress, it merely points up the fact that we cannot isolate this stuff called stress and hold it in our hands. We cannot isolate it from the person directly concerned and measure it separately.

Because stress is not an objective reality, it is not equally experienced. Two individuals can be seated side by side in the same work environment, doing the same tasks and with the same demands place on them, in the same way, yet one individual will experience greater stress than the other.

This tells us that one other precondition is needed for someone to experience stress – the person concerned must actually care about the outcome. This is crucial, because unless you really care there will be no anxiety on your part about what may or may not transpire.

At the end of the football season, as various teams face demotion from one league to another, some fans become genuinely anguished. However, for those who do not follow football in general, or that team in particular, there is no concern one way or the other. Indeed, the whole organizational structure surrounding the sport could collapse and non-fans would be totally unaffected.

Stress is an internal phenomenon. We manufacture it ourselves. Sometimes we manufacture it inappropriately by caring about inconsequentials, or by caring too much about the wrong things. So when we are stress it is extremely useful to ask ourselves what is it that we care about so much, and is that sensible.

Who cares if you’re stressed?

You do!

As a parting thought, is it therefore nonsensical to blame employers for causing stress? And if stress arises because people care, how wise is it to work on increasing employee engagement? Isn’t this ultimately self-defeating?

Lessons in Staying Positive – #4

Words: 421. Reading time: 1 minute 24 seconds.

When people choose to feel stressed most also become very black-or-white in their thinking.

Things become either wholly one thing, or completely the opposite and, if people are feeling stress in a negative mind frame, they tend to focus much more on what may go wrong or what they might lose.

However, the standard response of rushing from pillar to post in an effort to cover all the bases, cramming more and more into every available minute, is unlikely to prove effective.

Is hurrying, accompanied by a constant sense of urgency, really the outcome we desire?

Apparently, engaging in these “roadrunner days” can lead to an increase in the cortisol levels in our blood. And because cortisol shuts down learning it is just about the least effective reaction we can have when faced with change and uncertainty.

The ability to learn and learn fast is exactly what we need to retain when confronting challenges.

The fourth lesson is: slow down to get there faster. In particular:

1. No hurrying through conversations. The most important conversations in our lives deserve our attention. You won’t know how important any conversation is unless you take the time to stop and listen (see Aural Communication).

2. Slowing down means not missing the treasures in life that we don’t notice when we’re hurrying. This may be the delight of a child, birdsong in the morning, or the awkward, halting, but heartfelt gratitude of someone we’ve helped.

3. We can slow down without necessarily dawdling. Instead we can now do the right things, at the right time, in the right way, at the right pace. The time needed will come from eliminating all the effort previously spent in looking busy and harassed, while being largely unproductive. Who’s benefit did that truly serve other than our own?

There’s a lovely little story on just this point.

A farmer had a wagon full of apples. He stopped a man on the side of the road and asked how far it was to market.

The man replied, “If you go slowly it’s about 3 hours away.”

However, the farmer was in a hurry. He didn’t want to spend 3 hours getting to market, so he decided to go much faster and thus arrive sooner.

But the road was filled with ruts, potholes and pebbles. The faster he went the more of his apples bounced out of the wagon.

By going faster he made sure that the journey lasted all day, because he had to keep stopping to pick up his apples.

Mining Facts and Missing the Point

Despite appearances bad decisions are rarely made because people don’t have all the facts. In the political sphere the Treasury will have been fully aware of the impact on taxpayers of abandoning the 10% tax band. The Treasury may even have alerted Ministers. Nevertheless, although the facts were noted, plainly they were not given sufficient weight.

In the run-up to the present ‘Credit Crunch’ the financial institutions were fully aware of what they were doing and, one hopes, so were the regulators. But merely knowing the facts proved insufficient. Clearly, they did not understand the facts and the whole unstable structure was allowed to plough on into the crash barriers.

The Burmese Government will be well informed about the consequences of Cyclone Nargis and how badly their population has been affected. However, here facts are equally useless because they are being ignored.

Business is subject to the same purblindness when it comes to facts. Too often when plans go awry Governments call for Royal Commissions or Parliamentary Committees; business calls for internal audits or additional research. More facts will not help them regain the perspective they have lost.

When facts have failed to register, the continued pursuit of yet more facts painfully echoes Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in ‘Hard Times’. Gradgrind worships facts and figures. He puts his faith in abstract theories rather than direct observation of real people and real needs. The asymmetrical approach to human life of early industrial England, the denial of some of the basic needs of human beings, is being repeated in what some are pleased to call our post-industrial age. The structure of the economy may have changed. Too many of the attitudes live on. The cost in human happiness is great.

In Dickens’ Coketown, the needs of the factories dominate everything else. The factory hands work long hours in oppressive conditions, and they live in cramped houses. Their lives are monotonous; every day is exactly like every other day, just as all the houses and streets look alike. In Coketown, there is a strict uniformity in everything. The workers have little time off to relax and enjoy themselves. Does that sound familiar?

Employees and those running their own businesses will recognise the close parallels. Today we still struggle with long hours, astronomic housing costs, poor diets and an existence where evenings and weekends are nothing more than the exercise yard of our own imprisonment.

Each business, each day, has the opportunity to step back and take a clear-eyed view of the workplace we have built for ourselves. If it is not as we would wish it, then we can change. If you think it isn’t as easy as that then you will be setting yourself up to fail as a self-fulfilling outcome. Give real change a try. Take action. You may surprise yourself.

The Source of Stress

A recent Whitehall report on stress claimed that high-pressure jobs which cause chronic stress can dramatically increase the risk of a heart attack (Independent, 23 January). Unfortunately, the report would appear to have the causation hopelessly muddled. The possibility that its findings could lead to tougher guidelines for employers on reducing stress just perpetuates the confused thinking.

The inference is that the jobs in question are inherently stressful. Thus, only by changing either the job, or the way that it’s managed, can the level of associated stress be reduced. A little reflection shows that this is not the case. Stress is an emotional state experienced by a particular individual.

Imagine there’s a woman called Mary who has just taken on a task that’s entirely new to her. She is keen to perform the task well not only for her own satisfaction, but also to impress her boss, to obtain a much needed increase in pay that will help her stave off mounting debt and, finally, to get noticed by that dishy man in the Purchasing Dept. Her first few tries are a disaster. Her workmates laugh at her. She believes she will never perform the task well. Her stress level is rising.

At a different time and place a man called Philip also takes on an entirely new task. Philip considers the task trivial and it is really of no interest to him. He attaches no importance to anyone else’s opinion, he is already wealthy and there is no significant other on whom he wishes to make an impact. His first few tries are also a disaster; he fares no better than Mary. His workmates also laugh at him and, although he believes he will never perform the task well, he is totally unconcerned. Philip is not stressed.

In each case the task in question was identical. The reaction to it and its associated outcomes were entirely different. The task is neutral. The stress experienced only rises when the person concerned attaches particular significance to what they are doing. Someone who is largely indifferent to what happens in any particular set of circumstances is not going to get stressed.

The association between the stress people report and their biological responses found by the Department of Epidemiology at University College London is to be entirely expected. A person’s emotional state feeds through to their physiology and their behaviour. They are inextricably linked. Such a finding merely confirms an interaction that is already recognised and well known.

Earlier results from the studies, led by Professor Sir Michael Marmot and published in the European Heart Journal, showed that those in low-status jobs who were required to follow the orders of their bosses were more stressed, and died sooner, than the hot-shot executives handing out the orders. Again, this is to be expected. Those hot-shot executives are a self-selecting sample.

If you have the ability to become a hot-shot executive, but do not relish the stress you associate with that position, then you unlikely to either put yourself forward for promotion, or accept it should it be offered. Those lower down the hierarchy will include a higher proportion of those already approaching the limits of their abilities, those less mobile in the job market for want of talent and those essaying new tasks and fresh assignments with which they have yet to become comfortable. Professor Marmot’s findings are a glimpse of the blindingly obvious.

Given this set of facts it would be perverse to place the onus on employers to mitigate the stress experienced by each individual in their workforce. Even among those engaged on exactly the same work, in the same location for the same boss stress will vary from individual to individual. Those that care most will be stressed most, other things being equal.

But other things rarely are equal, so is the employer entirely culpable in respect of Mary where the money element of her emotive reaction is self-imposed and outside the employer’s control? Or is the expectation now that employers should hire only those that couldn’t-care-less on the grounds that people with that attitude are less likely to experience stress?

Full and appropriate consideration and nurture of the workforce is in the interest of every employer. Some legislation in some areas is necessary to direct the unenlightened, but the nanny tendency of the British state can go too far, especially when it is guided by questionable science.

Healthy Workforce Campaign is Misjudged

The Government are about to launch a campaign. It will be aimed at employers and it will try to get them to promote a healthier lifestyle among their workers. The emphasis will to be on physical exercise such as jogging, cycling to work, or going to the gym. The Government’s aim is not entirely altruistic since it wants to lower the cost of the welfare state and increase GDP at the same time. However, they seem to be tackling the issue from the wrong end.

It is said that Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Health, finds it "incredible" that 175 million working days a year are lost to sickness absence. Quite why he finds it so hard to believe is not explained. Sickness is a widely recognised and well documented occurrence. His own government routinely report such statistics.

Perhaps the figures have escaped his notice until now because he has been so busy being Secretary of State for Education and Skills (since May 2006 until Gordon Brown).

Or was it his time as Secretary of State for the Department for Trade and Industry that distracted him?

Before that, his time as Minister of State for Employment Relations and Regions and, before that, as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Competitiveness may have also diverted his attention.

I suppose that 175 million working days a year could easily have slipped below his radar while he was representing employees as part of the Communication Workers Union since 1976, where he served as General Secretary in 1992 and Joint General Secretary from 1995 to1997.

And perhaps he was preoccupied with other mundane matters as a member of the General Council of the TUC from 1994 to 1995.

What he should be reminded of (note to Health Department civil servants – pass it on) is the European Social Partner agreement ‘Tackling work-related stress’ that the DTI signed on 13 July 2005 during his tenure as Secretary of State (5 May 2005 to 5 May 2006). As it was made clear in that agreement, each year in this country there are over half a million instances where people are absent from work through job-related stress. The cost to UK employers is an estimated £3.7 billion. On average, each stress related absence involves 9 working days lost, a total of 13.4 million days a year.

Work-related stress is now the biggest cause of working days lost through occupational injury and ill health according to a HSE guide. As the TUC pointed out on hearing of this new campaign - lunchtime yoga classes are no substitute for reducing stress at work.

Alan Johnson’s previous initiate, which seems to have slipped his mind, deals with stress. It has yet to deliver any discernable benefit because no substantial effort has been put behind it. This is no time for yet another piece of Government window-dressing. Mr Johnson should concentrate on those areas most able to deliver the benefits he seeks in the shortest possible time. Dealing with stress in the workplace will have the biggest impact on reducing the number of days lost to sickness absence.

A report from The American Institute of Stress highlighted that:

* 40% of job turnover is due to job stress
* 60% to 80% of on-the-job accidents are stress-related
* 75% to 90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints or conditions
* Health care expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high stress levels

According to a 2005 Mind report "Stress and Mental Health in the Workplace" nearly 10% of the gross national product of the UK is lost due to work-related stress, through sickness absence, high labour turnover, lost productivity value, increased recruitment and selection costs, and medical costs.

A Gallop Poll in 2001 found:

* 80% of workers feel stress on-the-job
* Nearly half say they need help in learning how to manage stress
* 14% felt like striking a co-worker in the past year but didn't


And the Health Canada Website states that employees under sustained stress are more likely to suffer:
* 3 x more heart problems, back problems
* 5 x more of certain cancers
* 2-3 x more conflicts, mental health problems, infections, injuries
* 2 x more substance abuse

Of course, I have a vested interest. I'm a business coach and coaching is a proven method of tackling stress. The payback is quick, easy and painless. Employers could help themselves and their employees more effectively by using coaching in the workplace than by preaching health and fitness to an already overburdened workforce. Physical exercise has its place, but where people are already suffering high levels of stress it is likely to be seen as an unattainable luxury. If Government, and employers, would first tackle this primary cause, the rest is likely to follow.