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But what is Stress, exactly?

July 13, 2010 By
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Stress apparently causes more lost working days in this country than anything else. From my perspective that’s not al bad news because my company does training in how to manage it and mitigate its effects.

But what is Stress, exactly?

There are dozens of definitions, but the one Im going to use here is perhaps the most simple of them all – Stress is the Pressure you can’t handle. You can be under as much Pressure as you you like, but if you can handle it that’s all it is – Pressure. It’s not a problem until you can’t cope. At that point it becomes Stress.

Prime Minister David Cameron
Image by The Prime Minister’s Office via Flickr

The person in the UK who probably has the highest Pressure job in the UK at the moment is the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, and yet he’s not showing signs of Stress. Why? Because he feels he can handle that pressure.

I often hear of people complaining vociferously they have a “very high stress job”. Maybe some of them do, but a lot of them respond to offers of help or expressions of sympathy with words to the effect of “Oh, no, I love it!”. In which case folks, you don’t have a high Stress job at all. You have a high Pressure job and an ego.

Deal with it. As one of my kids would say “Suck it up”. As the US Marines would say, going even further, “Embrace the suck!”.

Don’t go around belittling the problems of people who really are stressed by pretending you are but are coping with it. By definition, if you’re coping with it, it ain’t stress!

Okay, so I’m being more than just a little provocative here, but I’m sure you get my real point.

The beauty of this model of stress is that it brings to mind a different way of dealing with Stress. Typically we think of dealing with Stress by looking for ways to reduce the amount of Pressure we’re under – such as by extending a deadline, or by getting in an extra member of staff. The alternative, of course, is to look at ways of increasing who much pressure we can handle – that is, by increasing our robustness.

And of course that can be done either by increasing our skill-base, allowing us to become more technically competent, which may work in the short term, or by changing the whole way we think, which works in the longer term…..

Simon

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  • http://twitter.com/presentations Simon Raybould

    OOOps! Typo! In the penultimate paragraph….. “who much pressure” should read “how much pressure”!

  • http://www.birdsontheblog.co.uk/ Sarah Arrow

    I think the key to the stress issue is – increasing skills and recognising that some people do not have the capacity to do certain things. My hubby, bless his heart, thinks if it is online, that I can do it. Recently I have been stressed to death over an ebook and I knew from the outset that I didn't have the skills and I was in a tizz for three weeks over it.

    I sought some advice about it and in the end I traded skills with someone to get it done :) I sleep better and I learned something, that spending a budget in one area may require more money for another area if it turns out better than you thought. In this instance I knew my limitations, it was others that refused to believe that I had them! Which is nice but stressful :)

  • http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Write-Winning-Non-Fiction-Publishing/dp/1907498060/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267183488&sr=1-1 Suzan St Maur

    It scares me that people who suffer from “stress” in their professional lives are given time off sick from work, as they would be for a chest infection or sprained ankle, rather than be sat down and asked why the hell they're in a job they dislike dealing with stuff they can't cope with?

    Stress has become a fashionable excuse for people's discomfort whilst trying to deal with more than they're capable of / want to cope with. Let's not call it “stress” any more, but be more truthful in our understanding of it. Is it:

    Aiming-too-high-ness?

    Square-peg-in-a-round-hole-ness?

    Should-be-honest-with-myself-and-do-something-else-ness?

    Do-I-really-get-off-on-stress-but-complain-anyway-ness?

    (Please add to this list as you wish!.)

    Whoever it was who first thought up the “stress” culture and saw the opportunity for a whole new industry and multiple means of giving birth to cash cows, was on to a winner. That's yet another reason to ask yourself, as Simon says, “but what IS stress, exactly?”