Ask a housewife, a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, an employee, an employer, and even an O level student as to why they always wear anxiety on their sleeves and the prompt unified answer will be: because we are stressed. Most of them may use “stress” to mean, that a looming challenge is giving them butterflies in the stomach. Not knowing much, if it is a condition that requires medical aid and attention? Stress is a silent killer – just as hypertension and sugar intolerance is. So, what actually is stress?
LIFESTYLE
Ask a housewife, a professional, a doctor, a lawyer, a banker, an employee, an employer, and even an O level student as to why they always wear anxiety on their sleeves and the prompt unified answer will be: because we are stressed. Most of them may use “stress” to mean, that a looming challenge is giving them butterflies in the stomach. Not knowing much, if it is a condition that requires medical aid and attention? Stress is a silent killer – just as hypertension and sugar intolerance is. So, what actually is stress?
Stress is the “psychological, physiological, and behavioural response by an individual when they perceive a lack of equilibrium between the demands placed upon them and their ability to meet those demands, which over a period of time, leads to ill-health. S. Palmer (1989). Let me de-mystify this definition.
What causes stress? Is stress a symptom of a problem or it is the problem? Friedrich Nietzsche says, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” An objective can be a stressful factor, but to achieve it, the human will has an inbuilt faculty to bear its negative fallouts. The cure to stress starts by first discovering the problem. On most occasions in our everyday life, at work or at home, we remain oblivious to factors contributing towards the emergence of stress. Let’s therefore examine the origination of stress in our lives. To be able to handle and contain them, we must unravel, like peeling an onion, the inception of stress factors.
First and foremost is work-related stress. The emphasis by the supervisor to achieve unrealistic targets and the consequence of not being able to do so, dealing with notorious colleagues (every organisation has its share of this bunch); the continuous need to watch your back if the environment is hostile etc. These are all major job-related stressors.
Some bosses / supervisors love to create an environment of stress. They believe it makes them look good as hard taskmasters. Striking an exaggerated no-nonsense attitude by remaining reticent, aloof, and withdrawn is aimed at keeping others on the edge. In my personal view, a manager that displays uncalled-for urgency and impatience is a person to watch closely, for he/she certainly has something to hide …. So they mask that inadequacy by resorting to verbal or silent bullying. These bosses are themselves on most days a perfect picture of a “stressed supervisor”. Luckily, Nature's law is an aid to the victims of bully managers – if you, as managers are a “cause of the stress”, you will most likely get in double, not in equal measure, the health injuring, stress.
A major source of ‘stress’ is disequilibrium in work-life balance. Horrendous time management is its major consequence. Stress inducing agents are uncontrolled discussions in meetings, unannounced and impromptu meetings commonly called huddles, prolonged meetings, calling meetings at odd hours – some start very early to convey their craziness, some do it very late in the evening for the same reason. The lines drawn between their work and life always remain smudged. I have seen many supervisors who loved ‘creation of stressful environment’ ending up with arrhythmia, acidity, hypertension, diabetes, placement of stents, going through a by-pass surgery, a divorce and finally, a quicker than expected permanent confinement in the ‘lands of silence’. In fact, as young management trainees, we used to joke, that in order to climb the hierarchical ladder, we would have to have our chests cut open by cardiac surgeons since over 90 percent of our bosses, had gone under the knife, due to stress.
Tension consumes energy, leads to lethargy, fatigue, irritability, and subsequently to a poor sense of judgment. On most occasions, we bleed ourselves over what may never happen. Every single minute of stress makes you lose hours of happiness. Stress shortens life and hastens age.
Causing oneself stress over what you can do nothing about is actually suicidal. Like how futile and unrealistic is the imagination to physically eliminate the corrupt elements from our polity and society is what most of us conclude as the only possible solution, after being bombarded by the rhetoric of charged television anchors, who churn out these talk shows from 7:00 pm to until wee hours of next morning. These shows are meant to cause and create unrest, distress, and anxiety.
Some colleagues, you would find, architect their own acceptability by constant complaining, remaining passive players or by showing aggression, instead of assertiveness. A disruptive person, who picks up arguments and fights, is just another stress-inducing agent. Many of my family, friends, and colleagues love to remain in stress over issues like, traffic jams or congestion on the streets. In bumper-to-bumper traffic conditions, the levels of anxiety are so high, that many would like to run over the car ahead or some wish to get off and physically settle the score with the perpetually honking motorist at the rear. I find listening to music on any FM radio channel, as a source of mustering positive energy, helps you avoid getting stressed out on the road. Unappreciative bosses or insulting bosses or even those demeaning conversationalists at work, must be hunted upon. Their anxieties must be put to rest by cultivating a corporate culture of harmony, positivity, openness, and mutual prosperity.
To handle, manage and overcome stress, examine the problem and look for energy-seeking solutions. Pointing to the stress alone is not a solution. Seek the sufi-path, seek spirituality. How and what? People resort to medication, when you actually need to pray the visit to the doctor needs to be replaced with a visit to the priest!! Anxieties emerge from concerns about the job, business and family. Anger is a major source of all ills and hence must be controlled, harnessed and profusely caged.
Depending on their source anxiety and stress need to be handled differently. To rid yourself of stress, no same rules can be applied in any or all situations – you cannot follow a one-prescription-cures-all approach here. If a walk across the greens I can relieve myself of daily work-related stress; however, a matter like troubled marriage cannot be solved by hiking or hitting the gym. It is said worries go down well with soup than without, so take a piece of black chocolate after dinner, it may help. But we can’t forget that to fight stress, the recipe has to be a do-able. The sheep can pass resolutions on the need to be a vegetarian, while the cunning fox, will surely have a different view.
You feel, the way you act. Situations in life, at home or at work place wary, it is the proper management of action and reaction that either induces or eliminates stress. Identify the specific stressors and take positive actions to minimise their impact upon everyday life. Monitor and change the way your mind thinks …… alter the thought pattern that leads to anxiety….instead take the route to acceptability. Mostly it is the presumptive nature of human mind that prompts you to see, what is not actually but these? This unnecessarily ushers reactions to a non-existent situation. I call it self-inducement of stress. Finally, there is no harm in not fretting over the smallest things, inclusive of the imaginary.
Learn to relax, listen to music, and give ears to the learned. Have screensavers on your gadgets, phones, pads, tabs, PCs, of lakes, gently flowing watercourses, or waterfalls that you can often look at or hear the song of streams, it soothed the nerves. In the Far East, most offices have large fish tanks - with colorful fish, mostly at the entrance – the reason is twofold, one fold relates to good omen from Feng Shui concept and the other is to ‘calm down nerves’. All managers/leaders must find time to sit before a fish tank and think! It is so soothing.
The writer is a freelance contributor
