Stress Symptoms

Stress and Life Crises

Understanding the Importance of Optimum Stress Levels

It is important that you recognise that you are responsible for your own stress - very often it is a product of the way that you think. Learn to monitor your stress levels, and adjust them up if you need to be more alert, or down if you are feeling too tense. By managing your stress effectively you can significantly improve the quality of your life.

This section explains the linkage between stress and performance, and shows how you can ensure that you perform at your best by optimising stress levels.

The approach to optimising stress depends on the sort of stress being experienced:

• Short term stress such as difficult meetings, sporting or other performances, or confrontational situations. Here the emphasis is on short term management of adrenaline to maximise performance.
• Long term stress, where fatigue and high adrenaline levels over a long period can lead to degraded performances. Here optimising stress concentrates on management of fatigue, health, energy and morale.

Short term stress

(Please note that this graph will be a slightly different shape for different people in different circumstances)

Where stress is low, you may find that your performance is low because you become bored, lack concentration and motivation.

Where stress is too high, your performance can suffer from all the symptoms of short-term stress.

In the middle, at a moderate level of stress, there is a zone of best performance. If you can keep yourself within this zone, then you will be sufficiently aroused to perform well while not being over-stressed and unhappy.

This graph, and this zone of optimum performance are different shapes for different people. Some people may operate most effectively at a level of stress that would leave other people either bored or in pieces. It is possible that someone who functions superbly at a low level might experience difficulties at a high level. Alternatively someone who performs only moderately at low level might perform exceptionally under extreme pressure.

Long term stress

The graph below shows the way in which performance can suffer when you are under excessive long term stress:

The graph shows four major stages that you may go through in response to sustained levels of excessive stress:

1. During the first phase you will face challenges with plenty of energy. Your response will probably be positive and effective.
2. After a period of time you may begin to feel seriously tired. You may start to feel anxious, frustrated and upset. The quality of your work may begin to suffer.
3. As high stress continues you may begin to feel a sense of failure and may be ill more frequently. You may also begin to feel exploited by your organisation. At this stage you may start to distance yourself from your employer, perhaps starting to look for a new job.
4. If high levels of stress continue without relief you may ultimately experience depression, burnout, nervous breakdown, or some other form of serious stress related illness.

At a simple level it may appear that a measure of 'toughness' is how well you keep on going under extreme stress. This is simplistic. It is certainly possible to be self-indulgent and use stress as an excuse for not pushing yourself hard enough. It is, however, also far too easy to let yourself be pushed to a level where your work, and physical and mental health start to suffer. The strongest and most flexible position is to actively manage your levels of stress and fatigue so that you are able to produce high quality work over a long period, reliably.

High performance in your job may require continued hard work in the face of high levels of sustained stress. If this is the case, it is essential that you learn to pay attention to your feelings. This ensures that you know when to relax, slacken off for a short period, get more sleep, or implement stress management strategies. If you do not take feelings of tiredness, upset or discontent seriously, then you may face failure, burn-out or breakdown.

As well as paying attention to your own stress levels, it may be worth paying attention to the stress under which people around you operate. If you are a manager seeking to improve productivity, then failing to monitor stress may mean that you drive employees into depression or burn-out. If this is a danger, then reduce stress for long enough for them to recover, and then reconsider the pace you are setting.

Finding your optimum stress levels