Why tackle it/ stress & health
Stress is a subject we hear a lot about these days. We often read about how much money stress is costing British industry in sickness benefit due to stress related illness or in lost man hours due to absenteeism. Recent figures issued from the Health & Safety Executive estimate that stress costs us 13.5 million lost working days in 2007/2008. That amounts to a lot of money!
However, if we were to dwell on the impact that the HSE statement makes and take this as factually accurate, the logical next step would be to fear or at least be concerned about this issue. In fact, there are two points to make here:
Point no. 1
Media representation of stress has done its fair share in spreading the message that this is a negative experience, an illness almost, from which most of us will suffer at some time. FACT: Stress is not an illness but it can exacerbate previously existing illness.
Point no. 2
It is completely unreasonable to assume that stress is solely responsible for the rise in the figures that I’ve listed above. There are many circumstances that contribute to this statistic. Stress is not an illness nor is it something you can die from. In general, it is a reaction of our body that occurs naturally. We experience it whenever we are exposed to threatening situations and the subsequent release of hormones and chemicals into our body can affect health. It is the state of the nation’s health overall that we need to look at. Even though we already do look at these subjects, further research would be good. We need to acknowledge why we are all more sedentary than we’ve ever been; why we eat refined carbohydrates so much; live on caffeine, and look for stimulants such as nicotine to cope. Stress can exacerbate pre-existing conditions but it is the bigger picture of why we are often diagnosed with illnesses symptomatic of insufficient exercise, excess fat and an over-secretion of insulin that really matters.
To recap: we cannot eradicate stress nor should we try. However, we can learn to manage it – stress may happen by accident or by design but stress management cannot happen by accident. We need to make a determined and committed effort to effect those areas of our lives that are within our control to change or moderate. Identifying these areas is essential and having the motivation to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate this change needs hard work. We all need support and this site is designed to help you find it.
Stress is a natural and normal reaction. We all experience it because as long as we are alive, we will encounter stress. However it has become an overused term due to the multiple references to it and this has the effect of ‘watering down’ or diluting what stress really is.
Your body experiences a natural but emergency reaction of chemicals released by your nervous system. These chemicals receive the information to react through the incredibly fast acting responses of your brain. These responses are not controlled by conscious thought; they are triggered by a very primitive connection at the back of your brain to a small pea size object in your head called the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is responsible for sending a message to your adrenal gland placed mid-way in your body near your left side, to release a fabulous chemical called adrenaline.
Adrenaline is remarkable. It is a complicated chemical that literally speeds up your system, revving your existing processes into a frenzied buzz of action. There is only one reason for this. Your brain must be able to get your body out of danger whenever it is necessary and this reaction is an ESSENTIAL survival mechanism should you ever really need it.
Adrenaline may make some people feel sick but this looks like fun!
What else do we need to think about?
Adrenaline is in many ways a great chemical because it’s the same substance that gives us vitality and a happy ‘lift’ such that many of us positively thrive on it. However, when adrenaline first hits our bodies there is a very specific chain reaction which is worth knowing. Which organ would you guess would be the most important then when adrenaline gets pumped in – the brain or the heart?
The answer is the heart. We thought we could control stress by suggesting people should talk to themselves and calm down that way but the reality is that in the first few seconds it is the electrical output of the heart that cuts off the narrow section of the brain called the frontal lobe and therefore affects our decision making abruptly giving us a DIY frontal lobotomy!
The effect of this is simple; we must let the fight or flight response do its job and avoid complicating situations by trying to stay effective and talk even more or act on something that we don’t have the capacity to plan. Simply stay as calm as you can and get out of the situation as fast as realistically possible, whether on the phone, talking to someone who’s upset you or in the car.
The trick then is to calm your heart back down so that your brain re-engages and you can think clearly again. The breathing technique 5-2-5 encourages a coherent or stable rhythm of the heart and will help with this. It is a process I teach you in the section ‘help with tackling symptoms’ further in the site.
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Symptoms of Stress
Owing to the fact that we all experience stress as a matter of everyday living, we will experience some symptoms of stress too. Insufficient exercise as I mentioned before means that we remain ‘mobilised for fight or flight’ for long periods of time. One specialist put it well when he said:
“ If you use a system that has evolved in 99% of beasts on this planet for dealing with a three-minute crisis and turn it on for 30 years worrying about a mortgage, then what you get is a constant switch ‘on’ of the stress response. It simply didn’t evolve for this and the body pays a price”
Dr Robert Sapolsky
Symptoms of stress are quite normal therefore, but it helps if you can have a method for determining when a symptom is ‘significant’ to us and should be acted upon, as opposed to being more typical. Typical symptoms still have to be watched but if you are sleeping well, have regular moods, cope well with most situations, and can laugh regularly then your symptoms are unlikely to be a problem.
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Typical symptoms include: -
Headaches |
Mild Sleeplessness Difficulty concentrating Lack of focus Tiredness |
Emotional Feeling ‘down' Irritability Grumpy |
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The stress questionnaire you can download from this site is one method that we designed as a company. It is not exhaustive but will help you identify your symptoms of stress if you have never analysed these before.
..click here to download the Questionnaire on Stress (pdf)
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The Chemistry of Performance
Let’s look at something; I call it the Chemistry of Stress because it illustrates the different states we experience in a typical day or week.
So what does this matrix reveal?
Well, if we look at the top left quadrant and describe the characteristics or behaviours that accompany being in that state it describes what you are like when you are on an anabolic, adrenaline high. Most people would say they feel a buzz, an energised productive rush that helps them get things done and they do so happily. They are busy and feel good.
Now look at the bottom left quadrant which is an anabolic relaxed state. When you feel like this you look calm, feel ‘chilled’ and soothed. If these feelings seem alien to you then chances are you’re not getting enough of this Serotonin-induced high and need a bit of guidance as to how to feel this more often. Keep reading and this site will help. The top right quadrant is the one that describes a catabolic adrenaline high and the symptoms more typically associated with a negative state of stress. This person is experiencing the side effects of being exposed to Cortisol. Here people would describe feeling grumpy, irritable, frustrated and probably prone to anger. This is undoubtedly a vicious circle that is difficult to break at the time you’re feeling it. We all know how hard it is to stop feeling irritable, but it pays to try because Cortisol aggravates your system and perpetuates the problem which leaves you prone to making mistakes, whether verbal errors or real ones.
The bottom right quadrant is a catabolic but relaxed state and describes a negative change that can range from being simply lethargic to apathetic to more serious symptoms associated with depression. When you or someone you know starts to behave out of character - their appearance changes, they may withdraw from life, talk less, take time off work and generally seem less able to cope. They are experiencing the early stages of depression and are likely to need support to get themselves out of that state.
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So what does this all mean?
The most immediate thing it means is to learn to move towards managing stress better so that you can feel ‘in control of it’ rather than ‘being controlled by it’.
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What to do now
After scoring the questionnaire and looking at the matrix, you should have a much better idea about your own level of stress. What you may like to do now is follow these guidelines in order to prioritise the level of stress you’re experiencing and determine which symptoms are the most important to target for improvement.
Re-write the top symptoms from your questionnaire, those are the ones you answered ‘Always’ to. If you have none, then re-write the ones you answered ‘Sometimes’ to. Now you need to ask yourself three questions as follows: -
How often do I get this symptom?
How bad or significant is it for me?
How long does this symptom last?
If your symptoms of stress are a concern to you and you feel there is any medical reason to require the advice of a doctor, then consider arranging a visit or even for a check-up. If that does not help to solve the problem, then the chances are your symptoms are telling you something about your lifestyle or approach to situations and this needs to change to get any longer term relief.
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Severe Symptoms
Examples of significant symptoms:
- Feeling persistently unhappy
- Not taking holidays
- Working every weekend
- Working long hours because you believe it is necessary
- Finding your social life hard work and wanting to avoid people
- Confusion, distress or feeling easily overwhelmed
- An increase in physical, emotional or psychological symptoms – e.g. a cold becomes persistent, a one-off upset stays with you for a long time, or you start personalising events believing you are at fault or to blame for everything
Help with tackling symptoms: -
It is massively more motivating to see quick results than to change the way you think in life, handle failure from the past or visit a Counsellor unless you need to do so, and the way to do that is to learn to manage your physiology. This will impact on your feelings and calm your behaviour, enabling you to learn new behaviours by default because you will realise how much more successfully you handle a situation. This is why we call the stress control approach of ‘managing your state’ a process that enables you to reach peak performance both at work AND in life. It also explains why I founded a business which fast-tracks your well-being because I’m a believer in processes that see quick results for maximum benefit.
To help yourself, it can be useful to learn a breathing technique that helps you achieve Cardiac Coherence as mentioned previously and we call this rhythmical breathing process 5-2-5. It is possible to learn this type of breathing simply by following the guidelines here but for a more practical tool you might want to look at is the Cardio Sensory Trainer available in the shop on the site because it is a very visual tool. The kit comes as a small sensor that you attach to your ear and plug in to the USB port of your PC. You load a disk on to the system, click on the word ‘set up’ and it’s good to go!
Once you have opened the file on your PC there will be an icon on your desktop called CST and if you click on it then a box appears ready for you to input your data. If you don’t want to do that simply click cancel and it goes to the homepage instead. Click on the icon for ‘new user’, attach the clip to your ear (but remove an earring if you are wearing one), and up comes your heartbeat depicted in two graphs that show the number of beats per minute and how rhythmical or erratic your heart beats are at that time. Now move the cursor to the top of the screen and click on the shape called the breath pacer. To the left of the page will appear a cylindrical shape with a moving series of bars inside it that depict when to breathe out and when to breathe back in. It is set to 6 breaths a minute with brief pauses at the bottom of each breath so that you can copy this pattern and help your heart to reach a stable and coherent heart rate.
The two graphs change after a couple of minutes to show you a colour banded graph instead which helps you ‘see’ if you are calm and stable by watching for the line to hit the green or top area of the graph. Reaching this will illustrate how calm and relaxed you are. It is ideal if you copy this for about 5 to 10 minutes every day for 2 weeks in order to get used to it and teach yourself this pattern so that you can default to it without too much thought.
If purchasing the CST doesn’t appeal or you have a MAC PC which this kit is not currently compatible with, try to emulate this breathing pattern by counting inside your head to 5 as you breathe out, then pause for a count of 2 before breathing in to a count of 5. On no account get out of breath as this will make you feel dizzy so if you need to simply speed up until you can get so practiced that breathing like this is easy. I do so whenever I am sitting in the car waiting traffic lights or in a jam; before speaking on the stage, when someone has said something upsetting, when I am eating my meals and so on. I estimate that I breathe like this probably 10 or more times in a day because it’s quite easy once you get used to it.
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All of the following tips are explained in detail in my book ‘More Life – Less Stress’ but here they are summarised for ease: -
1. Serotonin, which you probably remember me mentioning when I talked about the four quadrants, is a much-needed chemical that regulates our appetite and our mood. It is released at the onset of daylight and helps us stay calm and happy for much of the day. When Serotonin levels drop we can become less calm and more anxious. Several things affect Serotonin levels. How much sleep we get for one because we need to manufacture Serotonin at night, so it seems logical that as people get less sleep because they’re stressed (a common complaint by many), their production of this vital substance is interrupted. The solution therefore is to do anything you can to ensure a good night’s rest.
2. We need Melatonin at night to help us sleep and this is is manufactured during the day in bright daylight which we don’t get in great quantities in this country, or in-fact in many European countries. This is why some people who are sensitive to short days with low levels of light can become depressed and suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD syndrome. Much of this misery can be alleviated through the simple purchase of a light box; a portable plug in light that emits 10,000 lux (the measure of light intensity), into the room for a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes. You can buy a light box from www.outsideIn.co.uk for around £120 or alternatively large department stores such as John Lewis sell them or Boots.
3. The other way to experience sufficient Serotonin during the day is to ensure that you eat a sufficient supply of a substance called Tryptophan. This is a chemical needed for Serotonin to cross over the sensitive electro-chemical receptors in your brain. Foods that contain Tryptophan are easy to find; they include almonds, apricots, bananas, chicken, chocolate, peanuts and turkey. Small quantities of these substances in the form of a chicken sandwich for lunch and a handful of nuts mid morning or afternoon ensure that you experience a Serotonin lift some 20 minutes later.
4. No plan for effective stress management would be any good without mentioning exercise as one of the ways to change body and brain chemistry. This is because adrenaline causes your muscles to contract ready for action and the only quick way to quickly rid those muscles of that tension is by vigorously moving the muscle. It isn’t necessary to do hard physical exercise if you don’t like it but it can help if you learn to like walking a lot! Walking for 30 minutes a day can dissipate the adrenaline in your muscles and make you feel considerably less tight and under strain. Exercises such as Pilates or yoga have their place too but it is generally acknowledged that aerobic exercise is valuable in its own right because it strengthens your heart and as I have already mentioned your heart plays an important role in the stress response.
5. Fun and laughter are vital to our health and well-being. Bursting out laughing is a great way to relieve tension and I can think of many a time when I’ve been angry or irritable with someone and it’s simply drained away when they make me laugh. My little boy has a gift for doing this although I have to be careful to still remember to tell him off if it was really important to do so!
6. Next I would describe something I’ve called hobbies and time for you. It is very important to break the tension of your week by taking yourself away to a different physical place or space in your mind. It’s possible to achieve this by doing your favourite hobby whether that’s a sport or a pastime.
7. Variety is the spice of life, so the saying goes. Stimulation and change are good for you in small doses. Constant stimulation - which some frenetic jobs can be - isn’t necessarily a good thing so planning a holiday, a weekend break or even a day out creates a much-needed break in the intensity of stress and exposure to stress chemicals. It gives you something to look forward to, and also helps generate Serotonin hits in your body giving you a great feel good factor.
8. There is a considerable soothing quality in receiving a hug, or giving one. If you haven’t got someone to hug then cuddling your pet can achieve much the same effect. This may seem frivolous but actually human contact is a very significant stress reliever and numerous studies support the importance of touch both with infants and for elderly people so why not for the rest of us?
9. Support is critical to coping with Stress, particularly in times of crisis. Most of us use our friends and family for this and they are often great but if they have a number of problems of their own; are not necessarily good at empathy or wouldn’t know how to help for the best, consider using a confidential source of support such as a coach or counsellor because they will be impartial and give you a sense of perspective on the problem or problems.
10. A reminder of the importance of breathing as we mentioned earlier. 5-2-5 is easy to remember and critical to the health of your heart.
These ten tips are the basis of a quick fix solution for stress. They do not reduce the situations that stress you but they will increase your resources and give you a chance to cope better. |
All about Stress
Sue is founder of www.sue-firth.com and you can contact her by
e-mailing : sue@sue-firth.com
or calling : 0844 800 4292
