STRESS - BRING IT ON!

It’s funny how people tend to switch off when I talk about stress. Perhaps they pretend that it relates to other, weaker people and is not relevant to them. Business people are the worst culprits. They can handle stress; they thrive on it. They love the buzz, the pressure, the adrenaline fix. They feel that anyone who can’t take it should ‘man up’.

During my 20 years in recruitment and, indeed, drawing from my experience of my own job interviews when I was younger, I was dismayed by the common question posed by recruiters. “How do you handle pressure?” It seems to me that what they were actually admitting to was that their work place was a stressful environment and it would be fair to respond that one coped well with pressurised or stressful situations but what steps were they taking to reduce stress in the workplace because nobody can work on fast burn indefinitely. Of course, that response would not get you the job and the obvious response to the question, the one they wanted to hear was in effect, “Stress, bring it on!”

Actually, a certain amount of stress can be a good thing. It helps drive us to achieve goals, to meet deadlines, to be innovative. The danger is that we stay in overdrive and become unable to ‘switch off’, to relax. Our stress levels build and it starts to have an effect on our health and our personality. We become irritable, snappy, unsympathetic. We start to get more colds and minor ailments as our immune system weakens. If the situation is allowed to continue, more serious illnesses can follow.

What we need to do is to learn to relax but there are two main problems. Firstly, the people who need to relax the most are the ones who always tell me they don’t have time to relax. I tell them that if they took ten minutes a day to relax properly, then they would find that they seemed to have more time but this usually falls on deaf ears as, in truth, saying they don’t have time really means that they fail to recognise the problem or don’t see it as a priority. Secondly, many people don’t know how to relax. Sitting watching the television or going to the pub for a drink is not necessarily relaxing!

Perhaps a lesson can be learnt from one of my clients. He was a workaholic and his stress levels can build to the point where his wife or daughters notice his increased tetchiness and say to him, “Time to go and see Charles”.