The Hindu Business Line : Getting a handle on stress

There is no such thing as a single technique that fixes stress, says Dr Wolfgang Linden, the author of Stress Management: From Basic Science to Better Practice ( www.sagepublications.com).

“Fixing” stress responses makes little sense if the causes are unknown and remain unaltered, he adds.“Stress needs to be understood as a process of individuals interacting with their environment. And it doesn’t help to push techniques if the life context of the individual is not understood,” emphasises Dr Linden, during the course of a recent e-mail interaction with The New Manager .

‘Welcome to the Linden Lab,’ greets the home page of the Behavioural Cardiology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada ( www.psych.ubc.ca). Research conducted in the lab, one learns, “is based on the firm belief that psychological distress can affect physical health.”

Despite massive research efforts worldwide, we still do not know enough about how this connection of emotion and health comes about and how we can change it for the better, concedes the site. “Our research broadly focuses on health risk behaviours and emotions and how they affect physiological processes that are relevant for the etiology and treatment of cardiovascular disease and cancer.”

Excerpts from the interview.

What is stress and what are the different types of stress? What factors are contributory to stress? Symptoms?

In a nutshell, stress is a process in which individuals recognise that situational demands exceed their ability to deliver, and this has negative consequences for emotional and physiological well-being.

I don’t think it makes much sense to try to determine different types of stress although we can certainly differentiate different triggers for stress responses.

The single most pernicious trigger for stress (and for maintained, chronic stress) is continuing interpersonal conflict with family members or people at work. Another class of important triggers is money problems and poverty, as well as excessive demands placed on people that simply cannot be met in the time available to meet them.

There’s a wide range of responses to chronic stress among which are poor sleep, continued worry, irritability, frequent anger, anxiety, depression, accident proneness, poor concentration, and indecisiveness. Add to this a list of psycho-physiological disorders, which are aggravated by chronic stress.

Are there clear findings that stress affects our health?

Absolutely, yes. There are reams of scientific volumes documenting these relationships. The concept of stress and its implication for long-term well-being has been documented for well over half-a-century. This is not to say that stress did not exist prior to the development of the term.

Ever since the groundbreaking work of Hans Selye in the mid-twentieth century, the research literature on stress has grown at a rapid rate. Stress researchers and clinicians can now rely on a massive amount of literature to help them with their work and derive recommendations for their clients.

Why is stress management important? Are there measures of stress?

Getting a handle on stress is necessary because of the extremely well-documented impact of chronic stress on mental and physical health. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a simple measure of what stress is.

To some degree, people themselves are quite good judges of when they are stressed. However, there are certain context variables like court cases, where subjective ratings are not very reliable and trustworthy.

While laborious and not inexpensive, obtaining additional peer-ratings from supervisors or family and measuring physiological changes like blood pressure or stress hormones are extremely valuable ways to determine whether somebody is in a chronic stress condition or not.

Can you suggest a few simple exercises that can help in de-stressing?

At a minimum, I urge people to learn good breathing and relaxation techniques, and plan their lives to include systematic breaks. Also important is to develop and nurture good supportive interpersonal relationships and have reasonable expectations for themselves and others.

Should employers assist staff in managing job related stress? How?

At a very pragmatic organisational level, there is convincing evidence that routine offering of employee assistance programmes that can assist employees with personal problems and work-related stress is highly cost-effective for employers in that the cost of the programme itself is more than balanced by decreased absenteeism, reduced turnover of staff, and higher productivity.

Also, there are times when poor organisation of the workplace, unclear role definitions, and incompetent supervisors create stress problems for large numbers of employees. In such cases, it is unfair and unproductive to blame individual employees and it makes more sense to conduct a review of the organisational efficiency.

How effective is forgiveness therapy in practice? Are there alternatives to such approaches?

The concept of forgiving as therapy is so new that research on its effects – despite being promising – is still scant and not convincing. What makes forgiving as a therapy appealing is that individuals who are stuck with pervasive resentment and anger towards others, which they cannot seem to shake, are actually able to take some degree of control over the situation if they find it within themselves to forgive those who may have harmed them. It is this sense of gaining control that is perceived as reducing stress.

Your views on the role of yoga and other techniques from the East in stress management.

For at least a few decades we have known that there are a wide range of methods and techniques that can help people activate a natural pre-existing ability to relax. These methods include approaches that have existed for thousands of years in Asia as well as more modern approaches, and embrace methods such as meditation, yoga, biofeedback, and autogenic training.

Remarkably, while protagonists push their differences, there is evidence that these methods have similar effects in that these effects are quite beneficial. Therefore, it really is up to the personal preference of therapists and their clients which one of these methods they prefer to learn. Having said that, I would urge that everybody learns and practices at least one of them regularly.

Would it be apt for the stressed to seek professional help? Is it then necessary to train professionals to help the stressed?

Feeling stressed is not akin to disease and is likely to occur to almost everybody at some point in his or her life. Therefore, it is useful for everybody to have basic stress management skills which can to some degree be learned from books or teaching videos.

Ideally, children can also learn stress management skills from parents and teachers and bring these forward into their adult lives.

Nevertheless, many people experience stress for extended periods of time and feel unable to cope, and as a consequence may experience full-fledged anxiety and depression, and/or notice that this chronic stress contributes to high blood pressure, worsens pain conditions, prevents restful sleep, and is associated with great difficulties in managing anger; in any of these latter conditions the help of professionals may be useful and seeking such help is highly recommended.

In addition, a posit with stress management is that those who help should be thoroughly trained not only in stress management techniques, but also in realising when more profound psychopathology is underlying the chronic stress and therefore in need of professional attention.

Bio: Dr Wolfgang Linden is Clinical Psychologist (Behavioural Medicine), in the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada. A ‘Diplom-Psychologe’ in clinical psychology from Muenster University, Germany (1975), he holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University, Montreal (1981).

Areas of Dr Linden’s expertise include: Clinical health psychology, reduction of health risk behaviours, treatment of hypertension, psychosocial cardiac rehabilitation, and psychological factors in cancer care.

His homepage opens with a one-liner from Emily Dickinson: “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” And the page ends heartily with ‘recent insights, quotes, and rules to live by’ thus: “Life is uncertain, eat dessert first!” “I am too old to be patient.” And “Maturity is acceptance of the inevitability of the defeat of our dreams. And that is the reason I am not mature.” (B. Callaghan)

http://InterviewsInsights.blogspot.com

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