The Wheel

Stress Management – A contradiction in terms?

A view on Stress Management by Doug Osborne; clinical therapist, facilitator and lecturer in stress management at Middlesex University.

The phrase stress management conjures up all sorts of things – not least some poor soul struggling uphill against a mountain of work, an over packed diary, expanding needs of the kids, partners, family, job....... LIFE! It’s exhausting talking about it let alone being inside it all. Ironically we all need stress, and here is probably a place to talk about this. Stress is a response by the body when a load is placed on it; this load can be something relatively small like the thought ‘I’m hungry’, it might be something a bit bigger like a gym workout, or bigger still ‘I’m in physical danger – get me out of here’.

Our stress response was genetically engineered many thousands of years ago; this design is actually very clever. When a sabre tooth tiger jumps out on us whilst out picking berries for the family it would be pretty useless to have to use our relatively slow rational thinking process to get us out of danger. Instead the body developed this way of switching off the ‘higher functioning’ processes and switching on a much older response. This response sometimes called the fight or flight (and hide) response is literally a chemical signature that increases heart rate, blood pressure, pools oxygen rich blood to the large muscles, switches off any unwanted processes such as digestion – who needs that when you are running for your life....and gets you the hell out of there.

So here we are bang up to date, in an office environment. Our report is coming up to deadline, late submission will derail the project our company has been working on for the last two years.....perceptively we also respond to this as a ‘threat’ – much the same as the sabre tooth tiger. On goes the fight or flight (and hide) system and we put the ‘pedal to the metal’ to get it done on time. Good. Job done, fight and flight useful.

Everyone’s happy.

Here’s where it gets tricky; firstly the fight, flight and hide mechanism was only ever designed to be switched on for short periods of time and fairly irregularly. Secondly some of the bodies more optimistic systems such as digestion, repair, immune defences, and even sexual function switch off. Logically who needs an ovulation or a sperm or an intestine full of food when in three seconds you could be lunch, best leave all that ‘planning’ stuff until you are safe?

Now translate that into 2010. We are having or have just had (depending on which papers you read) the worst global recession for many decades. Your colleagues may have been laid off, you may have had extra workload placed on you, and things are getting busier and no sign of HR hiring.

Same jobs to be done, same pressures... only less people.

Guess what the fight or flight mechanism is doing? It’s not rocket science... and so our fight or flight mechanism is on, the throttle is open much of the day and you are beginning to feel it. And feel it you do; when the chemical soup that is the fight or flight signature is present in your body it’s really hard to sleep properly. Sleep disturbance is one of the earliest sign of accumulated stress. Other things that might be present are lack of interest in things you used to enjoy, difficulty eating certain things, muscular tension, persistent headaches, and the list goes on (and you can check this out on our page on stress symptoms).

So we come to a point when we need to consider stress management

You may have looked around at stress management tips...some work some don’t – why?

This is because we are all unique – each of us has an individual response to an open throttle or extended period of stress. What may give you a persistent reoccurring headache may be fine for a colleague (but gives her terrible bloating when she eats). Your best friend seems to sleep loads when he’s stressed; you hardly get a good night’s sleep in a whole week. Our body chemistry varies so much is pretty tricky to dish out generic stress management tip – perhaps the exceptions are the obvious – don’t smoke, eat well, take rest. I guess you have figured that out already!

On our Wheel Course you will get a detailed insight of how you respond to stress; what do you do already that works, what you could ditch in terms of things that elevate the stress response, what could you add to manage your stress and we break this down into four categories – what happens in your mind, body, emotional centre and finally the most nebulous and perhaps the most important - meaning. We have designed the workshop to furnish you with individual tools – some fast track, some slow burn to manage your stress effectively.

The Wheel is designed as a high calibre workshop that takes from a broad variety of psychological models to give pragmatic and fast solutions to stress management.