Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (13 page)

What medication
doesn't
do is calm the water or mend any holes. Instead, it is a bit like having someone else alongside you for a while, bailing for you. This takes the pressure off and can reduce the risk that you will go under, bringing things to a much more manageable level. If it is just a storm that will blow over, medication can help you to cope while things are hard, and once they calm down you can gradually reduce the medication and stop. Medication can also give you a breather giving you the time and energy to do some work on mending any holes you have that might be making things worse. So, medication can be used alongside a therapy such as counselling or CBT, and it can make it much easier for you to have the emotional energy to look
into what is going on beneath the surface in your brain. The medications prescribed now are not addictive and you shouldn't be on them for life. Medication should be about getting you through a rough spell or helping while you work on some other issues – so do ask your doctor if they can refer you for some counselling or CBT as well. Medication is particularly useful where certain symptoms are concerned, and specific anti-depressants have been found to be very helpful in calming obsessive anxious thoughts, for example, so if these are very much a feature of your difficulties, they may be suggested. Your doctor may also want you to consider taking medication if something that your stress is leading you to do might be dangerous – severe self-harm, for example, or if you are experiencing suicidal thoughts. Do be guided by your doctor but don't be afraid to ask questions and try not to rule out medication on principle. Used appropriately, it can make a big difference.

Let's assume that so far reading this book you have become aware of the stress you are under – and perhaps of some possible reasons why it might affect you so badly. The next step, of course, is to look at some practical changes that can reduce the impact of that stress, or at least help to manage it so that it does not have such a great impact. This is particularly important if your job or lifestyle naturally brings with it a lot of stress, or if something about you or your personality mean that you are more vulnerable to stress or react more strongly to it. This chapter is about starting to make some changes and setting some things in place that will help you to cope with the stress you are under and minimize stress where you can.

First of all, it's worth saying something about some of the less helpful techniques people often use to try to cope with stress and why they do not work. You will remember from Chapter 7 that very often our natural tendency when we are experiencing a lot of negative emotion is to suppress that emotion and hope it goes away. Suppressing emotions is hard work and over time it does become more and more difficult. If you are someone who suppresses what they feel a lot, then you will be much more at risk of starting to use something else in an attempt to cope with what you are feeling. There are three main ways that people do this, and each of these can lead to causing more problems than it solves in the long run.

Alcohol and drugs

The first thing that people sometimes do is to turn to something that artificially counteracts their negative feelings, triggers some positive feelings and helps them to escape their stressful world for a while. Alcohol is often what is close at hand, but increasingly common is the use of recreational drugs such as cannabis, ecstasy, speed or cocaine. Using alcohol or drugs in this way often begins simply as part of socializing, and many people who have very stressful jobs will talk of the ‘work hard, play hard' lifestyle. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a social life, and if you do work very hard, then it is important that you have time to let off steam and chill out. However, be careful that what starts out as this doesn't become something you are using to try to cope with the stress of work. Although most of us would say that our own drinking is fine, around half of adults admit that they are concerned about the drinking habits of one or more of their friends.

Because alcohol is such an accepted part of our culture, genuine drinking problems can be missed. Alcohol is addictive, and using it to cope with stress can quickly become a problem. What starts as the occasional glass of wine at the end of a long day gradually turns into a few more each night, which becomes the bottle each night; that becomes occasional glasses at other times of the day when you are stressed, or something you need in order to get you through a stressful working lunch or difficult meeting. From that point, it is a slippery slope into alcoholism. The term ‘alcoholic' often brings an image to mind of someone old, usually male, shabby, smelly and defiantly unwell. But there are huge numbers of what would be called ‘functional alcoholics' in every town and city. These are people who habitually rely on drinking alcohol to help them cope and they consequently
drink far more than is recommended each week. Drinking too much has serious health implications, and organizations involved with alcoholism are working hard to target these ‘middle class' drinkers who are seriously risking their health. People who drink just twice the recommended limits (that is, 2–3 units per day for women and 3–4 units for men, with at least 2–3 alcohol-free days each week) are more than ten times as likely to suffer liver disease. It's not just the effect on your liver you should be aware of though, as drinking has been linked to other health risks, such as a striking increase in the risk of breast cancer (important information for the millions of women who drink more than the recommended levels each week).
¹
Drinking too much also has a massive impact on relationships and the people you care about most.

Drinking too much and taking drugs obviously carry their own health risks, but the main thing in terms of using them to cope with stress is that it just doesn't work. Alcohol is a depressant, so in the long run people who drink to deal with stress feel worse rather than better. It interrupts their sleep, leaving them exhausted and chronically stressed. And the impact of those hangovers and worries about they did the night before can often trigger more emotion for them to have to deal with, which certainly doesn't improve their day. Most of all, even though they may have delayed having to face those feelings, they will still rise up eventually. Just like other ways of suppressing emotions, drinking or taking drugs simply doesn't work.

Another reason that people sometimes use alcohol or other drugs is to find artificial ways of relaxing and counteracting stress. Stress can push us to our limit and has been linked with more serious problems such as eating disorders and self-harm. All these things feel as if they might help in the short
term but in the long term they certainly make things worse rather than better.

Scapegoats

Stress is something that causes a lot of negative emotions and generally makes us feel pretty lousy, but very often we feel powerless to do anything about it. A third thing that people turn to in order to try to feel better is attempting to change something else in the hope that it will make things better for them. It's as if that thing (usually something about themselves) becomes the scapegoat for everything else that is wrong (which they do not know how to change). Once you honestly believe that all your problems come down to that one thing, the solution feels simple – change that and all your problems will disappear. The most common scapegoat is something to do with weight or appearance. Many of us have got caught up in the illusion that if we can just control our weight and be slim – or even thin – then the rest of our life will also be better. Diet advertisements show people who have lost weight with miraculously transformed lives – they were once fat and miserable but now they are happy because they are thin! The truth is, of course, that losing weight (if we genuinely need to lose it) might improve some areas of our life but most probably the things that were making us really miserable will still be there. Millions of people in the UK alone have become caught up in cycles of behaviour concerning food and eating that leave them at risk of developing a serious eating disorder as they desperately try to solve the problems they have. Once again, trying to improve your life by blaming a scapegoat ends up causing many more problems than it ever solves.

‘Work hard, play hard'

The final mistake often made in trying to deal with stress comes from the ‘work hard, play hard' idea. As I have said, there are grains of truth in this and if you do work very hard, it is important to make time for yourself, time to let off steam and to relax. But many people – often those whose personalities make them prone to pushing themselves hard – fill their spare time with pursuits which, whilst fun, trigger almost as much adrenaline and stress hormones as the work they are leaving behind! An adrenaline rush can be addictive and the kind of sports that trigger it often also trigger endorphin release – the same hormones that are involved in making self-harm so addictive. Endorphins help us to feel more relaxed and positive and are behind the so-called ‘runner's high', when people say they feel fantastic after a long hard run. These activities are great fun and certainly good things to do, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they are relaxing! Although they are a great distraction and relief for the brain from all the thoughts of work, and although the endorphins they release may help you to relax in the short term, in physical terms they still add to that baseline level of the hormones related to stress.

This kind of effect can be very subtle. Remember that stress is not just about being ‘stressed out'. Even playing computer games – something many people do to get away from work and ‘wind down' – actually requires a lot of concentration and attention, which to your body is a form of ‘stress'. Or let's say you go away for the weekend – great fun but don't forget that the long drive (if that's how you get there) also involves a lot of stress from the perspective of both your brain and body.

So, what on earth
are
you supposed to do to handle stress positively?

The most important thing – more important than anything else – is to put into place times each week when you effectively and genuinely relax. We'll talk more about that in the next chapter as it's a topic in its own right, but a good place to start right now is to look at how you live your life and the boundaries you have between things that are stressful and things that are not. You need to take a kind of snapshot of your world. I encourage people to keep a diary for a couple of weeks of what they are doing each
hour of the day. Yours might look something like figure 13 below.

Figure 13: Example of a diary

Once you have your diary for a week or couple of weeks, sit down with some colouring pencils or a highlighter or two. What you need to do now is to code each section according to whether it was work, leisure/‘you' time, chores/getting something done that needed doing, or sleep. You might need other categories too – perhaps if you volunteer or do something in your evenings which isn't work but isn't leisure either, or if you have children or care for someone else in your family. Shade in your timetable according to those categories. This will give you a great illustration of where you give your time and energy at the moment.

Once you have done this, try asking yourself the following questions:

The first is simple.
How much leisure/‘you' time do you have in the average week? Do you ever ‘stop'?
Very often we find that with the amount we have to do, this precious time can get pushed out. We cheat by filling it with other things, or with those things which although they are leisure, are actually physically stressful. A third of people admit that they hardly ever have any private ‘me' time. Your body needs this space. Remember, it is about giving yourself a chance to lower those stress levels and return to that relaxed baseline. If you are one of the millions of people who never put in time specifically to relax, then make sure you read the next chapter carefully!

The second question relates to work.
How easy did you find it to define when you were and were not at work?
Some bits of the day are clearly work – usually that block of time in the centre of the day. In our 24/7 society, however, work has lost its clear boundaries. Unless you are lucky enough to have the kind of job in which you clock in and out and do no more work outside those hours, the chances are you will find your work creeping into what should be time for other things. Watch out for things such as the temptation to check your email out of hours. Yes, I know that your BlackBerry/iPhone/laptop/whatever it is (delete as applicable) is great because you can always be in contact with your work. But this means
you are always in contact with your work!
You never get away from it! This means you never properly switch off. This can keep your stress levels raised even when you are away from work. Remember that raised baseline stress and the effect that can have. It can contribute to problems with sleeping, interrupt family and leisure time, and increase
your anxiety as you feel those emails hanging over you all the time. Around a half of adults admit they experience stress because they pick up emails out of work time or never turn off their work phone. You need to be able to get away from work in your ‘down' time. If this is you, look at what simple steps you can take to try to put that boundary back in place. Do you really need to take your work laptop home with you at night? Must you keep your BlackBerry turned on in the evenings and at weekends? Can you look at getting separate mobile phones for work and for home calls so that you can make sure work does not intrude into your family or leisure time? Remember this is extra important if your job is stressful or involves a lot of giving out. If you do not make sure you have good regular time away from work, then in the long run you will risk burning out and not being able to do it any more. So, no sneaking a quick look at emails before you go to bed (is that really the best time to check work emails?), no taking non-urgent (and I mean ‘life and death' urgent) calls in your evenings, no quick calls into work on your holidays ‘to check everything is OK'. Give yourself clean boundaries and think: is this work time or not? The more you have messy boundaries and ‘grey' part-work-and-part-free time, the more at risk you will be of stress.