Forum (Spotlight Weekly)

How To Cope With Stress

By Dr. NIRANJAN PRASAD UPADHYAYA

Stress is the wear and tear our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment. It has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action. It can result in a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. With the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, a job promotion, or a new relationship, we experience stress as we readjust our lives. In adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us depending on how we react to it.

Stress can have both positive and negative effects. It is a normal, adaptive reaction to threat. It also motivates us to achieve and fuels creativity. Although stress may hinder performance on difficult tasks, moderate stress seems to improve motivation and performance on less complex tasks. If it is not coped properly, stress can lead to serious harms. Stress relates to the psychological state that derives from the person's appraisal of the success with which he or she can adjust to the demands of the environment. It is closely interwoven in all facets of life and encompasses broad areas, i.e., business, management, administration, industry, politics, social environments and psychology. Mental health research indicates that approximately 80 percent of physical diseases occur due to stress alone.

Usually, stress influences mental as well as physical health. People who experience a high level of stress for a long time - and who cope poorly with it - may become irritable, socially withdrawn, and emotionally unstable. Some people under intense and prolonged stress may start to suffer from extreme anxiety or other severe emotional problems. Anxiety disorders caused by stress may include generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. People who survive catastrophes sometimes develop an anxiety disorder called post-traumatic stress disorder.

The ability to "cope" with stress has been explained significantly in psychosomatic research. Researchers have reported a statistical link between coronary heart disease and individuals' stressful behavioral patterns. These patterns are reflected in a style of life characterized by impatience, hard driving competitiveness, and preoccupation with vocational and related deadlines.

Psychological experiments show that strong unresolved stress makes enduring changes in one's personality. If an individual persists in stress over a period of years, it makes him inferior, dull and non-adjustive. It is very probable that such types of affects reduce his or her general ability to adjust within the workplace and gradually degrade the overall efficiency in every sphere of life.

The impact of stress on people has its roots in medicine and specifically in the pioneering work of Canadian scientist Hans Seley, the recognized father of stress. In his search for a new sex hormone, he discovered that tissue damage is a non-specific response to virtually all-noxious stimuli. He called this phenomenon the general adaptation syndrome (GAS), and about a decade later, he introduced the term "stress" in his writings. He remarks that not all stress is bad and we should not try to avoid all stress, which actually would be an impossible task for most people. Rather, one should perceive responses to stress and then to try to cope accordingly.

A person who is stressed typically has anxious thoughts and difficulty concentrating or remembering. Stress can also change outward behaviors. Teeth clenching, hand wringing, pacing, nail biting, and heavy breathing are common signs of stress. People also feel physically different when they are stressed. Butterflies in the stomach, cold hands and feet, dry mouth, and increased heart rate are all physiological effects of stress that we associate with the emotion of anxiety.

The causes of stress are plenty and can affect any employee, a director or a blue-collar worker, young and old. This kind of stress emerges from psychological problems in a worker and will eventually and directly affect productivity. Any job condition can produce stress depending on how an employee reacts to it. Inadequate or excessive levels of stress or conflict can increase absence of turnover rates and finally affects the organization.

Stress tends to spark images of overwhelming, traumatic crises. Everyday events such as conflict with staff, unnecessary family pressure and misplacing checkbook are also induced stress within individual. Mental health experts claim that routine hassles may have significant harmful effects on mental and physical health. Psychologists introduce four types of stress that are (1) frustration, (2) conflict, (3) change, and (4) pressure. Usually, stress is an unavoidable consequence of life. Without stress, there would be no life. MBA students of Kathmandu University, School of Management (1999) have forwarded solution techniques of overcoming stress through various approaches, i.e., meditation, psychiatric consultation, exercise and optimism.

The science of copying follows diversified strategies, i.e., preventive management, change in organizational climate, management by objectives, managing environment, and provide employee facilities and individual's personal approaches. Especially, stress is treated in various ways, i.e., provide counseling, recreation facilities and improve the job design by matching the person with the work. Individuals may try to reduce stress through better management of time, nutrition, exercises, career planning, job changes, promotion of psychological health, relaxation, meditation and prayer.

Biofeedback is a technique in which people learn voluntary control of stress-related physiological responses, such as skin temperature, muscle tension, blood pressure, and heart rate. Normally, people cannot control these responses voluntarily. Both progressive muscle relaxation and meditation reliably reduce stress-related arousal.

In conclusion, stress is a major cause of physical and psychological problems in the developing and developed world. Especially, in Nepalese context, the pressure to work, earn, cater for the family may cause immense problem and creates various physical and mental symptoms within individual viz. heart disease, blood pressure, ulcer, cancer, suicide and death. Behavioral medicine is applied in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the stressed persons. Psychologists have found that stress behavior is multidimensional, genetic, physiological, psychological, social, and cultural. Psychological approaches have been extremely effective in modifying emotional, behavioral, cognitive and psychological components of stress. Principally, clinical psychologists and Psychiatrists in Nepal treat such types of psychosomatic problems related to stress.

(Upadhyaya is chief psychologist (joint secretary) at the Public Service Commission.)