CMR Canada  Employee and Family Assistance Programs 
Serving Canadians for 21 Years
 

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August 1998

Understanding Stress

What is stress, and what can cause it? 

For the purposes of these articles we consider stress to be anything that stimulates you and increases your level of alertness. 

Life without stimulus would be incredibly dull and boring. Life with too much stimulus becomes unpleasant and tiring, and may ultimately damage your health or well-being. Too much stress can seriously interfere with your ability to perform effectively. 

The art of stress management is to keep yourself at a level of stimulation that is healthy and enjoyable. This series of articles will help you to monitor and control stress so that you can find and operate at a level that is most comfortable for you. It will discuss strategies to reduce or eliminate sources of unpleasant stress. It will also explain what can happen when you do not control stress properly. 

Most people realize that aspects of their work and lifestyle can cause stress. While this is true, it is also important to note that it can be caused by your environment and by the food and drink you consume. There are several major sources of stress: 

The strategies that you should adopt to manage stress depend on the source of that stress. We will explain how to analyze this later. 

These different sources of stress are explained in more detail following.

Where you are in a physically or emotionally threatening situation your body adapts to help it react more effectively to meet the threat. This is controlled mainly by release of adrenaline. 

Adrenaline causes a number of changes that help you to survive. The main ones are: 

You may have experienced these changes as 'fear'. However where speed and physical strength are important this adrenaline stress will be helpful and beneficial - fear can help you to survive or perform better. 

Where calm thought or precise motor skills are important, it is best to control and, ideally, eliminate these adrenaline responses. 

In as much as these adrenaline changes shut down the function of organs that are essential in all but the short term, prolonged exposure to adrenaline can cause ill-health. 

Your personality can affect the way in which you experience stress. You may be familiar with the idea of 'type A' personalities who thrive on stress, and 'type B' personalities who are mellower and more relaxed in their approach. 

Stress can cause the levels of a neurotransmitter called noradrenalin to rise. This can give a feeling of confidence and elation that type As like. They can therefore subconsciously defer work until the last minute to create a 'deadline high', or can create a stressful environment at work that feeds their enjoyment of a situation. The downside of this is that they may leave jobs so late that they fail when an unexpected crisis occurs. This may also cause unnecessary stress for other colleagues who are already under a high level of stress. 

Other aspects of personality can cause stress. Examples are: 

Anxiety 

Anxiety occurs where you are concerned that circumstances are out of control. In some cases being anxious and worrying over a problem may generate a solution. Normally it will just result in negative thinking.

Experts describe the five main unrealistic desires or beliefs that cause anxiety: 

You may find that your environment or job are causing you stress. The stress you experience may come from some of the following: 

Environmental stresses 

Here your environment may be a source of unpleasant or distracting stimuli. These can come from: 

Chemical and nutritional stresses 

Here the food you eat may contribute to the stresses you experience. Examples of stressors you may not be aware of are: 

As well as these specific sources of stress, you may experience stress if you eat an unbalanced or unhealthy diet. You may find that some dietary deficiency or excess causes discomfort and illness which generates stress. If you are obese, then this causes physical stress on your internal organs and emotional stress as your view of yourself declines.While there is a lot of biased, dubious or incorrect dietary information around, you can normally rely on nutritional advice from your doctor or from your government's health department. 

Lifestyle and job stress 

Many of the stresses you experience may come from your job or from your lifestyle. These may include: 

too much or too little work

lack of clear objectives

Career development stress

Stress from your organization or your clients

Personal and family stresses

Fatigue and Overwork 

A particularly unpleasant source of stress comes from what some call 'Hurry Sickness'. 

Here you can get into a vicious circle of stress, which causes you to hurry jobs and do them badly. This under-performance causes feelings of frustration and failure, which causes more stress, which causes more hurry and less success, and so on. Stress-creating behaviour can compound this, as can an inability to relax at home or on holiday. If you do not manage long term stress effectively, it can lead to long term fatigue, failure and one of the forms of physical or mental ill health. 

Very often you can eliminate this sort of overload by effective use of time management skills, particularly by learning how to prioritize effectively. You can neutralize the associated stress by effective use of stress management techniques. 

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