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Stress and Your Worklife: Part 1
Sara Zeff-Geber
Senior Partner, Ph.D
What do we know about stress?
Stress has been defined in many ways by many different people. It has been a topic of interest to medical professionals, social scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and even zoologists. Let’s examine it briefly from several different perspectives, thereby getting a broad overview of the phenomenon, as well as its roots in the history of humankind.
The physiological stress reaction is our body’s response to any change, threat, or pressure put upon it, from outside forces...or from within. Our body then tries to regain its normal state and protect itself from potential harm. Thousands of years ago, during a far less complex era, individuals needed this response to stay alive and combat various kinds of physical threats (animals, other humans, flood, fire, etc.). This is one of many unique ways in which homo sapiens are equipped to survive in the world. Today, much of the stress we experience is manufactured in our minds. We perceive a threat (loss of job, anger from spouse, not meeting a deadline) and we begin to worry. Our bodies, lacking the ability to discern a deadline from a hairy beast, still react in much the same way they did 4000 years ago. So, the purpose of stress is to keep us alive and healthy – it’s a wake-up call.
Stress is inevitable. To be entirely without stress is to be dead! However, not all stress is unpleasant. When we discuss stress today we are usually referring to distress, but we can all relate to pleasant situations or occurrences which have caused us stress: weddings, births, promotions, receiving awards, reuniting with old friends, and countless others. Any change, positive or negative, requires a response from our bodies in order to adapt and bring us back to our relatively peaceful state
We can also look at stress as a state of imbalance between demands (from inside or outside sources) and our perceived ability to meet those demands. This is experienced most acutely when the expectation is that the consequences of meeting the demand will be quite different from the consequences of not meeting the demand. For example, if you were asked to create a marketing brochure and you felt confident of your knowledge of the product and your ability to organize the information, create attractive graphics, and put an interesting and attractive spin on the information, you will find the whole experience far less stressful than if you considered yourself inadequately informed, a poor writer, and not particularly creative. It would be doubly stressful if, on top of the pressure for an eye-popping masterpiece, the initial recipients were to be a beta-test group of the company’s largest and most valued customers, who would be asked to give feedback on their reactions to the new product based on your marketing piece.
Stressors come in many different shapes and sizes, and our response to them varies even more. In the next installment in the series, we will look at some of the more common stressors and some ways to recognize the signs of stress in our bodies.
Sara Zeff-Geber
Senior Partner, Ph.D.