Living Stress Free. By: Ellen Goldhar

Transcription

1 Living Stress Free By: Ellen Goldhar Sometimes life can appear to be unfair. For instance, it takes weeks to grow your hair and only seconds to cut it off; you can gain 5 pounds practically overnight, but losing it can take many a fortnight; and when you go on vacation it can take more than a week to decompress and feel stress-free, but all it takes is one day back in the office and you can be back to feeling like a tight-rope walker in a pressurecooker again! Although there isn t much you can do about the hair-growth to hair-cut ratio, nor is there much you can do to lose weight instantaneously outside of starving yourself, there are a number of things you can do to keep yourself from ending up stressed-out on the job. According to a study done by Statistic Canada, 64% of Canadians aged 18 and over say they experience some life stress and almost 25% say they experience quite a lot of stress in their lives. Job strain is a major

2 contributor to overall stress and Stats Canada estimates that the annual cost of work time lost to stress is $12 billion per year. The problem is the majority of those stressed-out people don t know how to handle their pressures effectively. Not true anymore for Kent MacCarl, fire chief for Whitby, Ontario, and client of Leeson Clifton, a registered massage therapist and wellness coach. MacCarl has come to appreciate the importance of stress management. I don t think I d be able to manage my stress as well as I do now without Leeson. She has taught me what it means to live a balanced life - eating healthy, getting a proper night sleep, exercising and learning how to take life in stride. When I first got the job as fire chief I wanted to prove myself and please everyone - immediately! This took its toll on me. I felt tense, uptight and at times would act out abruptly. If things didn t go the way I wanted them to I d let it eat away at me for days, says MacCarl, now in

3 his third year as fire chief. MacCarl acknowledges that since he s paid attention to what his particular stressors are his mind is better - he feels sharper, makes better decisions and over all, is enjoying a better quality of life. Dr. David Posen, who has devoted two decades of his practice to stress management and lifestyle counseling, has concluded some things about stress: We all have more control over our stress than we think. Most of our distress is selfgenerated. There is no quick-fix for relieving stress. To master stress we have to change. Stress mastery is a mindset as much as it is a collection of tools and strategies. It s the knowledge and confidence that whatever happens, we ll be able to handle it. The tricky thing about detecting stress is unless we re confronted

4 with a particularly overwhelming incident, like losing our job, it s easy for stress to go undetected. We easily chalk up those day-today hassles, i.e., rush-hour commutes to work, as part and parcel of the job. A lot of people have a great tolerance for pain and have learned to ignore what their body is telling them. For example, we ll ignore our bodies telling us we re hungry in order to stay focused on completing our work task and then binge once we get home, says Clifton who runs her practice in Whitby, Ontario. We are taught to get the job done first and check in with our bodies second. We can do both however, at the same time, says Clifton, with 17 years of experience under her belt. Turn up the volume on your body and regularly make a point of checking in with what s going on inside of you do you need to stretch, get a drink, move around, etc. Dr. Brian Baker, a spokesperson for the Heart and Stroke foundation says that there are some telltale signs that stress

5 has reached a critical level: You are thinking and worrying about work all the time and are unable to relax. You are spending undue amounts of time on the work itself or other interpersonal aspects of the work like your boss or coworkers. You are experiencing extreme exhaustion. You re short tempered. We tend to minimize the impact of stress on our bodies and although our bodies are terrific at adapting to its environment, eventually it catches up to us. Those small indicators are there for a reason and if we continue to ignore them they continue to get bigger until they finally get our attention via heart disease, stroke, on-the-job injuries, psychological disorders, migraines, or other health related issues. Warning signs: According to stress management expert, Dr. David Posen, there are four ways in which stress shows up:

6 1. Physical symptoms headaches, dizziness, jaw clenching or grinding teeth, tight or sore neck muscles or across the top of the shoulders, sweaty palms, nausea, diarrhea, indigestion, loss of appetite, fatigued, frequent colds 2. Mental symptoms memory problems, mind racing, trouble making decisions, loss of sense of humour 3. Emotional symptoms feeling anxious, tense, restless, agitated, irritable, short-tempered, depressed, fearful, lacking motivation, apathetic 4. Behavioural symptoms pacing, fidgeting, nail biting, foot tapping, yelling/swearing, crying, compulsive smoking, eating or drinking