Business Insight Zone

Among the other things it kills — people, for instance — stress kills your ability to do good work. If you want to improve your organization, get ahead in your own career, and enjoy your life in the process, it’s time to let go of your stress-embracing ways.

First, though, a key distinction. There is such a thing as eustress, or “good stress,” which is the sort of tension you feel inside when you’re exhilarated about something. (The concept was pioneered by Hans Selye, who did groundbreaking work on stress in the middle decades of the 20th century.) But that’s not what we’re talking about here — and not what most people mean when they talk about the stress of the workplace.

Stress Is Poison

This sort of bad stress contributes to a range of health problems — everything from hypertension to E.D. to high cholesterol to asthma. But it also saps your ability to be creative, since stress tends to provoke a fight-or-flight response in us that is toxic to higher rational function. So when you say you can’t think your way through a problem because you’re stressed-out, you are literally correct.

Unfortunately, the way many workplaces operate, you’d think stress was a cardinal virtue. Surely we’ve all heard the tales of woe from friends — when we haven’t had our own tales to tell:

• “We always move from crisis to crisis. I never have time to think.”
• “Every day at my office is a new fire drill.”
• “You would not believe how much time we waste putting out fires.”
• “I get queasy just thinking about going back in there every Monday.”

When my Twitter acquaintance Abbie Lundberg heard me talking about my interest in the ways that our neurology affects our business practices, she pointed me to this article — five years old, but still perfectly timely — from CIO Magazine. (Lundberg is CIO’s editor-in-chief.)

Managing Your Stress
Are you putting on a little weight? Do you think no one understands you? Do you feel out of control? Of course you do. Why should you be different from any other CIO? Here’s why you need to stop, take a look around and change your ways.

If you’re not a CIO, don’t be put off by the source or the subtitle: the article is full of useful observations and advice for office workers everywhere. When you have the time, do read the whole thing — it will repay the investment. Meanwhile, here are my thoughts on some key excerpts.

Stress may contribute to 85 percent of all medical problems, says Connie Tyne, executive director of the Cooper Wellness Program in Dallas, which counsels executives on stress reduction. Fifty-two percent of executives will die of diseases related to stress, according to Tyne. That’s partly because stress affects nearly every major system in our bodies, creating a laundry list of health problems — among them diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, allergies, asthma and colitis.

Death, Anyone?

The article goes on to describe the specific problems that stress creates for different parts of the body, including the GI tract and the circulatory system. It includes this arresting fact, which stopped me cold when I read it:

For 50 percent of the people who get cardiovascular disease, death is the first symptom, according to the American Heart Association.

I’m still a fairly young man, but that got my attention.

Constant stress does more than damage your health. It destroys your judgment and distorts your decision-making process. Constant stress has been shown to shrink the hippocampus, a region of the brain that controls memory and concentration. “We all know anecdotally that when someone is under stress they don’t have the clearest vision,” says Tyne. “They don’t have the patience to work through a complicated decision. They will have a tendency to abdicate or jump into a decision prematurely.”

There’s no escaping this basic finding from the past 20 years of neuroscientific research: Our behaviors inescapably affect the physical structures of our brains. Genetics and environment play their roles, too, but our own patterns of thought and behavior are a major driver not just of how we do think, but how we are physically capable of thinking. The good news is that we can shape our brains into positive, healthy directions; the bad news is — it takes hard work.

This Much Stress Is Not Normal

After describing how stress hormones unleash all sorts of changes in our endocrine systems — changes that are very useful if, say, you’re being chased by a bear — the article has this to say:

We’ve come to accept stress as a normal part of our lives, but there’s nothing normal about lighting up our brains with chemicals and shutting down half the systems in our bodies while flooding the bloodstream with sugar. Today, our bodies don’t get much of a break from the stress response, which was designed to be an occasional event, not a constant condition of existence. “We’ve all come to believe that occasional headaches or muscle tension from stress is normal, but it isn’t normal,” says Tyne. “A normal body doesn’t have headaches.”

How many people do you know who keep a bottle of aspirin in their desks for just these headaches? It’s ridiculous to think that we’re going to get good work done in settings like these, yet we persist in our ways because habits — especially the group habits shared across organizations — are very hard to break.

Working Out Your Stress

Anyone who’s ever walked out at the end of a frustrating meeting and kept on striding until they walked around the block will know that exercise is a great stress reliever. It turns out that science can tell us why:

The best antidote to stress is exercise. And viewed in the context of the chemistry of the fight-or-flight response, that makes sense. Exercise is simulated flight — a chance for all the sugars and hormones in the bloodstream to be used for their intended purpose. Exercise also feeds our brains some feel-good drugs such as dopamine and beta-endorphin — evolution’s reward for safely escaping the tiger.

There’s a virtuous cycle here, too, since if you’re healthier physically you’ll likely withstand stress better in the first place. Assuming we’re all grown-ups here, I’ll also mention something that the article didn’t: sex is another great way to flood the brain with those feel-good hormones. This, it seems to me, is yet one more reason to make sure that your job is in balance with the parts of your life that don’t relate to a balance sheet.

Avoiding the stress response itself — feeling less stress in the first place — is a lot harder. To understand how to control stress, you have to think yourself back to the caves. Three major psychological factors made cavemen’s stress hormones flow: lack of control, fear, and isolation. All three have modern correlatives.

The CIO role is tailor-made for feeling out of control. . . . CIOs have a vast amount of responsibility but little authority for controlling outcomes. This is what psychologists call low decision latitude.

“This creates a sense of chronic powerlessness,” says Scott Stacy, clinical program director for the Professional Renewal Center, which counsels executives on stress. “You can’t have an effect on what you need to have an effect on to generate a sense of [internal] calm.”

After reading this article and others from the magazine, I have new sympathy for CIOs, but they’re only an extreme subset of a prevalent type throughout the modern workplace: the low-decision-latitude knowledge worker. Maybe you know the type: smart, lots on their plate, high expectations . . . and always running into brick walls when they try to get things done. Sound familiar?

What are the solutions? Well, the CIO article and the resources listed below offer lots of suggestions, starting with reaching out to others to reduce that sense of isolation. But now I want to turn it over to you, dear reader:

What do YOU do to combat stress in your own working life?

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More resources:

• About.com: Stress Management
• CIO Magazine: Three Stress Reduction Tips for the Office
• CIO Magazine: Stress Not, CIO: Tips for Coping
• WebMD: Stress Management – Topic Overview
• WebMD: Workplace Stress and Your Health: Experts explain the dangers of work-related stress and provide solutions.

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(Photo by meyshanworld.)