The Healing Power of Stress at Work: Part 2

"The character of your existence is determined by the energies to which you connect yourself." Hua Hu Ching

If you really want to turn your work stress around you are going to have to evaluate your values and see how often they are on a direct collision course with your actions. If time with your family is your primary value, what are you doing spending weekends at the office? If your physical health is your primary value, why are you working eighteen hours days and catching quickie naps while you drive home? The stress therapist, Roger Mellot, once said that people leave jobs that are no longer serving them when the value of their sanity overtakes their need for a paycheck. The good news is that you do not have to choose between wealth and health; you can have both as long as you are clear about your needs and stay aware of the ways you go about meeting them. Once you shift from serving your ego to serving your inner self you will find that many of the work related stressors simply have no more meaning for you.

Unless you are willing to confront the habitual thoughts that are in conflict with what you truly value, you will most likely never experience the healing power of stress. It would be insane to think that you can subject yourself to ritualistic doses of bad stress forty hours a week and still feel like your life is anything other than drudgery, covered up by an occasional weekend’s worth of "down time." If, instead, you choose to take your work stress head on, I assure you that the rest of your life will benefit from the ripple effect. When you start to see your work environment for the playground that it really is, you might find yourself earning a true living, and happy hours will now take place at home rather than at the local watering hole. Commit to being truly self-employed—working in your own best interest—and watch as your self-worth begins to rise in ways that your stock portfolio never will.

The Healing Power of Stress at Work--Part 1

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. "

Bertrand Russell

It is ironic that what we call "earning a living" leaves so many of us feeling dead tired when it is over. I am willing to bet that no matter where you go to earn a day’s pay, you most likely report to a stress factory that pumps out some of the finest product around. I am also willing to bet that you have, at one time or another, thought that if you did not have to work, there would be no stress in your life. So synonymous are work and stress that I propose we just go ahead and say we are going to stress, rather than to work, and at least avoid the idealistic hope that it should be anything else.

Sarcasm aside, we can see that work is both the laboratory where we give life to our stress and the playground on which we let it run amok. Recent studies have suggested that as many as 80 percent of adults identify their jobs as their leading cause of stress—the other 20 percent, apparently, are unemployed and currently stressing over when they will be able to return to work. Being miserable at work is so embedded within our collective psyches that even people who profess to love their jobs will find things about it to stress over. The unstated pledge in many workplaces seems to be "If you want to be one of us, you are have to hate being here." Thus my phrase, Misery loves companies.

If we are ever going to break free from the destructive powers of stress while still having a roof over our heads, food on the table, and a thousand high definition channels on our super-plasma television sets, we are going to have to come to terms with work- related stress. I’m sure you have had the experience of having a perfectly planned day spoiled by the sudden awareness that it was not the weekend and your boss was eagerly anticipating your arrival. The fact that most heart attacks occur on Monday mornings is a depressing commentary on the power we have handed over to our careers.

I want to use the healing power of stress to provide an even more direct path through the job jungle and see if we can machete our way through the trials and tribulations of our careers. I hope to help you see the workplace as a training ground for your new outlook on stress and begin to take some of the work out of working. As some of you make this journey, you may have to face the reality that your jobs no longer serve your sanity and that your insurance is no longer covering the fallout. Others will discover that work has simply become the center ring in the circus of stress that seems to set up tents wherever you land. In either case, you are going to have to break the cycle of thinking that you can have a negative outlook and a positive outcome. We will do well to remember Eckhart Tolle’s advice that "When you fight life, it fights you back."

A good place to start your adventure is to pay close attention to others as you interact with them while they do their jobs. Try this with the cashier ringing you out at the grocery store, the bank teller handing you your money, the waitress taking your lunch order, the telemarketer trying to get you to buy and subscription to "Get a Life" magazine, the nurse taking your blood pressure and the taxi cab driver taking you home after realizing that you were the last one standing at the bar when they call "last round."

If you do this, minus the critical mind that will want to critique the performance of your fellow human beings, you will begin to experience suffering in its raw form. Allow your mind to extend itself and imagine what it is that lies behind what you once simply labeled "a bad attitude," "poor service," or "the devil incarnate." See if you can, if only for an instant, allow this wall to drop and feel the humanness in someone who, like you, most likely only wanted to come to work today and not leave with a splitting migraine. Don’t be surprised if this is a little overwhelming at first. Many of us have created such a separation between ourselves and the others that we bump into in the game of life that we see them as mere obstacles to our need for the good life. We are no longer our brother’s keeper but ones who keep our brothers and sisters at a safe distance so as to try and keep the crap from their lives splashing our happy suits.

Once you have encountered the workforce in this way, turn this light of awareness of yourself while you are busy doing whatever it is you do to keep the poverty monster off your back. Rather than berate yourself for missing the deadline, just watch the movement within yourself. While doing this, avoid the "poor me" syndrome that has you as the most overworked, underpaid and underappreciated employee in the known universe. Simply watch where in your body the tension lands and how your body responds to it. When the phone rings, avoid the reflex response of thinking that it can only be someone on the other end who has made it their personal mission in life to push you over the edge. Instead, really listen to yourself as you talk and feel the words as they slip across your lips. Apply this same routine to every interaction and activity at work. The point here is not to concentrate on yourself at work but to simply experience yourself while you go about your day. Don’t label you actions or interactions, instead, be what Buddhists refer to as the "silent witness."

What you will most likely find is that many of your responses are simply old habits playing over and over again. We are all good at witnessing these in our coworkers. The world of substance abuse recovery calls this "taking someone else’s inventory." I am suggesting that the very process of taking this inventory produces unnecessary stress in you. I am suggesting that one of the reasons that the work place becomes so dangerous is that many of us walk around carrying what we think are maps of all of the emotional land mines around us, while at the same time carefully burying our own around every corner and in every break room. This is why so many people actually report not feeling safe at their jobs.

Psychotic coworkers aside, you are your own worst enemy at your job. Yes, it might very well be true that your boss possesses all of the savvy of a sponge and that you have to rub shoulders with more shady characters than you would find in a Star Wars bar scene. However, you will still be faced with the fact your work stress still says more about you than those around you. To be fair, it actually says more about the human condition than it says about you, but I did not think that would get your attention in the same way. As the ego’s playground, the workplace will always be filled with tension. Mind games are the product produced at every job site no matter what the official company mission statement says and the fine print of every work contract should read, "The only thing worse than being left alone with your thoughts is being surrounded by the thoughts of others." So it should come as no surprise to you that at the end of a day’s worth of "my ego is bigger than yours" your head hurts, your chest feels tight, and the only thing you really have a grip on is the stirring wheel as your race home, with NASCAR-like precision, so you can tell your significant other about your plans to open up a fruit stand.

A Stress Revolution

Brain cells create ideas.
Stress kills brain cells.
Stress is not a good idea.

--Frederick Saunders






The healing power of stress? I have to admit that, even to my ears, these words do not seem to fit together. It seems an oxymoron, with the emphasis on the moronic, to suggest that stress can be anything other than something to avoid at all costs. As a therapist, I have been taught that stress is a destroyer. I have watched as it has consumed the lives of my clients, friends, family members, and, in an act of sublime irony, even this humble writer. I have tried again and again to use my therapeutic wisdom to outsmart it, to manage it, and even to try and remove it completely from life’s equation, and still it returned, sometimes with more force. I know that you do not need proof, but consider these often-cited facts about stress:

-- About a million people each day in the U.S. are absent from work due to stress-related disorders.
-- Up to 90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related complaints.
-- Up to 80% of industrial accidents are due to stress.
-- Over 50% of lost workdays are stress-related.
-- 14% of all workers say stress caused them to quit or change jobs in the previous two years.
-- 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects due to stress.
-- Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis, and suicide.

With this amount of bad press, we have to wonder who let this stress monster loose, and whether there is any way to get it back in its cage? Even more to the point, is there some way that we can learn to live with stress successfully and use its power to heal ourselves?

The answer to the first question, "Who let this monster loose?" is easy, but you are not going to like it. So let’s go to the second question about whether or not there is anything we can do about it. The answer to this question is a resounding "Yes!" If you are still wondering about the first question and stressing over what the answer is going to be, then you already know the answer, and should just relax and read on.

This is not about stress management. I am not going to talk about the physiological aspects of stress, nor will I tell you that you need to eat better, sleep more, and stop all of the fun things in your life that you have picked up as stress-busters. Why? You already know those things, and my telling you is only going to make you feel worse for not doing them. My goal is much simpler, yet also much more difficult. I am going to help you look at stress in a new way. The only requirement for this stress program to work is for you to have an open mind. If you have long since locked your mind and thrown away the key, take heart: this book will help you as well. As you move forward, you will most likely discover that your mind and stress are intimately entangled, and having a closed mind is one of the reasons that you still feel so much of the negative power of stress.

I have worked in the stress field for more than twenty years and lived with my own stress for more than forty-five, give or take—mostly give. As a licensed therapist, I have met with thousands of people in various stages of the stress continuum. If you are unfamiliar with the stress continuum, it looks like this:

Pre-birth..............Birth.............. After Death
No stress..............Stress............. No Stress

My clients have come to me in many guises, but the underlying theme to all of our sessions has been the same: "Life is stressing me out, and you are my last hope for any semblance of sanity." The irony, of course, is that going to therapy, for most people, is in itself a very stressful event. This irony did not seem lost on many of my clients, who almost invariably left therapy before making any notable changes.

It wasn’t until my own levels of stress became all-consuming that I began to seriously consider finding a new way to take on this monster. What I discovered was often in direct contrast with what I had been taught as a therapist, and seemed to run contrary to logic. I knew that I was either on the brink of a mental breakdown or a discovery that would forever alter the way I worked with my clients and, what is more, the way I saw myself in my relation to stress. Make no mistake about it: you, too, have a relationship with stress. In the same way that the alcoholic has a relationship with alcohol, you have created a pattern of living that includes stress as a primary character in the drama that is your life. My guess is that this relationship is, at best, dysfunctional, and, at worst, abusive. This, my friend, is great news—the relationship part, not the abuse. In the old models of stress, you were a victim—the world was out to get you and danger was around every corner. In the model I offer you, you are the director, writer, and actor of the story you call "Me", and you are long overdue for a rewrite.

Lastly, I am not going to preach stress-free living. While I think it is possible for those who inhabit higher planes to be free of stress, you and I are flying coach and the stewardess just spilled our drinks in our laps. So we are not going to remove stress, but we are going to move it. We are going to take it out of its current role as the spoiler of all that is good and place it neatly in a corner of the room, where it may occasionally raise a fuss to get attention—much like a puppy. Like any good pet owner, we will toss it an occasional bone, but the days of its peeing on the couch, pooping on the floor, and humping the cat are over. In the end,when asked by friends and family alike, "So, are you stress free now?" you will be able to answer proudly, "No, but I am free to stress."

In order to help create the opening to allow this new view of stress to take hold, I will be introducing Personal Stress Strategies and Techniques, or "PSST," thus creating the catchphrase, "Got Stress? Get PSST!" These thought-stoppers will be used to empty your brain tank so that new concepts can get in and take root. Each is designed to be used immediately, some are even reusable, and you may feel free to carry them with you wherever you go.

If you are like me and almost ninety-eight percent of the human population, you are probably feeling fairly skeptical about all of this. You might be thinking. "I have tried this all before. Every time I try to make changes to myself, it never lasts. Please, just leave me alone and stop all of the self-improvement mumbo-jumbo!" If this is your current state of mind, congratulations. You are right where you need to be. While it might sound tongue-in-cheek, I assure you that it is not. I really believe that in order for this to work, and for any real change to happen in one’s life, there has to be some doubt. This is the beginning of the healing process—seeing one’s stress as a pointer to something that needs attention. No good journey begins by already knowing how the trip will turn out. Where is the fun in that? In order to have a new relationship with stress, we are not only going to head down new roads, but we are also going to take roads very-well-traveled in a new way.

We will not be taking this journey without guidance. In addition to my experiences with thousands of clients, I am going to share with you the insights that I have gained through my own relationship with stress. While I may occasionally quote the likes of Sigmund Freud, William James, Carl Jung, or even Dr. Phil, I have found that much in Western psychological therapy falls very short of providing one with a way to live in harmony with life. This view, I am discovering, is becoming more and more fashionable in the profession, as the mechanistic/materialistic view of the mind has not always brought forth the ripest of fruits. More often than not, traditional psychological approaches put you at odds with life and needlessly sustain conflict and tension. Therefore, the pointers we will follow have less to do with the science of the mind and much more to do with the silence of the mind. Borrowing from the traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian mysticism, and ancient and modern sages, we will bring to life the meaning behind the words of the Tao Te Ching: "To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." We will find that once we look behind the veil of stress, we will discover that, in the immortal words of the sage Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Before starting any journey, it is always a good thing to take a quick inventory to prepare both physically and mentally. Let’s be honest: some of us have piled on so much stress that we barely cling to existence. Sometimes, the mere thought of trying to dive into unknown waters brings about great anxiety. While I want to assure you that you will survive this dive, it would be foolish to think that you will not experience a degree of fear and even panic. If this is the case for you, and it has been years since the last time you truly opened your heart and soul to anyone, you might consider talking to a trusted person before heading on. You can choose a minister, priest, therapist, doctor, hairdresser, or anyone else whom you feel safe around. Once you feel you have purged the stress tanks, and there is no psychological boogie man waiting to rob you of you last vestige of sanity, then "onward we go."