The Stress Connection

No one can avoid stress. It will be with you, in one form or another,

every day of your life—within your working relationships and when

you are at home, with friends, on the freeway, in a crowded department 

store, or watching the evening news. Stressors, great and small,

surround us at every turn.

Suppose your alarm clock fails to go off one morning and you

discover that you have overslept by half an hour. You shake your husband 

awake, leap out of bed, take a five-minute shower, skip your

makeup, and pull a brush through your hair. Somehow you manage

to get both kids dressed, fed, and out the door to the school bus. But

you have no time for coffee and your own breakfast, so you start the

day hungry and not looking your best. When you get to work, you

find out that your secretary is out sick, so you must answer your own

phone and deal with tasks that you would normally allocate to him.

Somehow you get through the morning. But when you come up

for air, you remember that the Tuesday noon staff meeting has been

switched to Monday. Your secretary would normally have reminded

you of this, but he isn’t there. The quiet lunch you planned is out, so

you order a sandwich from the deli and wolf it down in five minutes.

All through the meeting you have indigestion.

On your way home you stop at the gas station to fill your nearly

empty tank. There is a line of cars waiting and you notice that gas

prices have gone up another ten cents per gallon. When you stop by

the bank, both of the ATM machines aren’t working, so you have to

go inside and wait in line to get some cash. When you stop by the

grocery store to pick up something for dinner you buy prepackaged,

frozen entrées because you are just too tired to cook. Your cell

phone rings and it’s your husband telling you that he’s stuck at the

office and won’t be home for a couple of hours. When you get home,

the nanny is on the phone with her boyfriend and the kids are fighting

in the living room. You speak more sharply than you’d like to the

nanny, quiet the kids and give them dinner, then eat with your husband 

when he gets home at nine. You both watch half an hour of television 

and fall into bed exhausted.

Everyone’s life is filled with small stressful episodes like this.

None of them, taken individually, will kill you. But over time the

effects of constant stress become cumulative, causing your health,

well-being, and energy levels to deteriorate. Stress causes wear and

tear on the body, keeping you on edge, giving you heartburn and a

jumpy stomach, making it difficult for you to sleep soundly at night,

unbalancing your hormone levels, elevating your pulse rate, and

making you cranky and irritable. It also makes you more susceptible

to colds, flu, and more serious types of disease by lowering the efficiency 

of your immune system. If you factor in lifestyle choices such

as being overweight, drinking too much, poor nutritional habits,

and not exercising, you are only increasing the long-term effects of

stress, both physically and emotionally.

The trick is learning how both to manage stress and to raise your

stress threshold. Minor incidents add up over a long time until they

do as much damage to your mind and body as one major, traumatic

incident. If you don’t learn to release stress daily or find a way to

make it work for you over the long haul, eventually stress will make

you sick or even kill you. It will certainly rob your life of energy, joy,

motivation, and fulfillment.