Spotting The Signs Of Stress
What are the signs of stress?
What is stress?
How does stress affect us?
Your cholesterol levels will become higher, and so physically it puts you under an awful lot of pressure. It also affects you in terms of you might not think so clearly, you might become more accident prone. And again, the accidents are the dramatic ones. It's not about driving your car into a tree. It's more like knocking into things, little paper cuts, being more clumsy. You get forgetful so you know, you open up the oven and you wonder why you've put the milk in it! It's those kinds of things that people experience.
Why does stress affect us?
People allow stress to get to them, because when you think about it, you have to ask yourself what triggers the stress in the first place, and we have a very simple model that we worked in. We said, "Imagine a pair of scales, and they're nicely balanced. Now, when they're balanced, you might be a really busy person, but because they're balanced, all that is is pressure. Lots of people love pressure. They hate it when life is too boring. When the scales are not balanced, that means the demands that have been made of you are greater than the resources you have to cope, then your body perceives all this as a threat, and when that happens, it starts acting as if you are in real danger. If you think that the stress response is about survival, putting your foot on the zebra crossing and legging it, it's not really about when your boss says, "Oh, can you stay until seven o'clock and finish that report?" The problem is that our brain doesn't differentiate. It just thinks, "Lots of demands, I can't cope, I'm stressed."
Can stress be good for you?
Well, its an interesting debate that's going on at the moment about whether stress can be good for you. I think that the way to look at it is like this. Pressure is good and you can learn to cope with pressure and you can get better at coping with pressure. So challenging yourself, pushing yourself a little bit further to handle situations is not a bad thing. Its a bit like going to the gym, the more you do it, the stronger you get. However, stress is completely different. When you are stressed, your body is working against you. So the way that we would certainly look at it is you can increase your ability to deal with pressure and that is a good thing. But stress is never a good thing.
Can stress make you ill?
In severe cases, stress can actually make you become ill, because what it can do is that if you're under that prolonged pumping out of stress hormones, you're not sleeping, for example, and you're getting much more irritable, then your whole body is working against you. It is not uncommon. If you think of stress as being mild, moderate or severe, if you are severely stressed, it's like getting on the bus and going all the way to the terminus. If you're on the wrong bus, you've got a heck of a long way to come back, and it's at those points that people will potentially get heart problems, and they'll potentially get certain psychological problems like nervous breakdowns, depression, anxiety. Physiologically, stress can cause you a lot of illnesses.
What is burn-out?
It means that your body and your mind has been pushed beyond what it can cope with and now you are probably suffering from a whole range of emotional, psychological and physiological problems.
Is there a link between stress and self-esteem?
Is stress a new issue?
Stress is not a new issue, in fact if you look around in some of the history books, it may not have been called stress, but all the symptoms that people get are well documented back hundreds and hundreds of years. I think what's happened is that we've now got a label for it, we call it stress. We've now got a terminology that we can use to say when you've got this package of issues, they you are stressed. I think that's what's new.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a physiological and psychological condition. So for example, when you are anxious, your tummy's probably got butterfly's, and you might be a little bit shaky. Also, you're not breathing perhaps as deeply and normally as you would, because you're scared. I mean, anxiety is really an extreme form of fear. So you have that on one side. Now on the other side, emotionally it's all about fear, you're terrified. When you're anxious you are just packing it.
How can I avoid anxiety?
If you want to avoid anxiety, first of all you have to identify the kinds of situations that you feel anxious in. Then you need to look at those and say "what is it about this situation that causes me to feel anxious?" The next stage on from that is when you've identified that, you need to set a plan of action in place. For example, it could be some physical strategies like just some deep breathing, just calming yourself down physically, taking five or 10 minutes away just to think it through, going for a walk because that can help too, just to get things back in perspective. You then need to look at your thinking style. A lot of anxiety is brought on, we know this from research in cognitive psychology, from the way that we think. So, for example, if I am going to a meeting and I am stuck in a traffic jam, I am sitting in a car, going, "Oh my G*d, they are going to think this about me, it's going to be awful when I get there. How am I going to handle it?" I'm actually winding myself up and I'm more likely to make myself more anxious. If, however, I'm in the very self same car, and I'm going, there's not a lot I can do about a traffic jam. It's unfortunate there's no mobile reception. I'll just listen to some quiet music on the radio. I'll keep myself calm, because if I stay calm I'm going to arrive in a much better state. This happens to everybody. Now if you talk to yourself in the second way, you will reduce your sense of anxiety, rather than in the first way, which raises it. So, a lot of anxiety can be reduced by the way we talk to ourselves. Equally, we need to think about our lifestyle. If you are burning the candle at both ends, if you are rushing around like a headless chicken, if you are trying to please everybody, the likelihood is that you are going to get more anxious, so you really have to tackle those issues, too.
How can I relax?
A key element in managing your stress is learning how to relax. You can relax in a number of different ways. You can simply switch your brain off, spend half an hour reading a magazine, being quiet with yourself. You can take up meditation. For example, people who meditate each day actually change the quality of their brain waves, and it's an excellent form. It's not one of those things where you've got to sit cross-legged. You can even do it on a train. You can teach yourself to meditate for 10 or 15 minutes. It will actually help you. The other things that you can do are making sure that, for example, you get exercise, because it is a form of relaxation. When I say exercise, I don't mean go down to the gym and kill yourself. Just walk for 15 or 20 minutes. Another thing that you can do is to learn to breathe properly. We have what we call the rescue remedy relaxation exercise. It's a bit like people who like taking Bach flower remedies. What you do is you simply take in a deep breath through your nose, and then you slowly let it out, and as you let it out, you relax your tummy and your shoulders. If you do that three or four times - and nobody notices because you've got to breathe anyway, so nobody actually notices you doing it - it will just calm you down. There's a number of ways, including going to relaxation classes.
