Team Partners Telecommunications

Dealing with stress

Posted on Apr 23, 2023

Over the last few months, we’ve talked about looking after your customers and your staff and co-workers, what we haven’t talked about in any depth is looking after oneself, which, after all, is the most important thing you can do. If you’re not in good mental and physical shape yourself, how can you possibly help others?

Back-track a moment. When you read ‘good mental and physical shape’ what do you think of? Are looking after yourself mentally and looking after yourself physically two separate concepts to you? If your answer to this is ‘yes’ it wouldn’t be at all surprising. When did your doctor ever show the slightest interest in your emotional condition, or ask any questions about your past? Most medical professionals are taught to address the physical outworking of any presenting condition without questioning the root or origins of it.

And yet…It is increasingly being recognised that our mental health and physical health cannot be treated separately as if there was no connection between the two. There’s actually nothing new here, a couple of thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher, Socrates, noted a doctor’s criticism of his fellow doctors, saying, ”This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown…they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.”

Taking the connection between our physical condition and mental health to be true, what then? It’s this, the one thing that has the greatest negative affect on our mental and therefore physical condition is stress. This isn’t really the place to go deep into the medical evidence for this, so allow us to try and give you a precis…

Any trauma we experience is stressful. Man’s natural reaction to a stress is the release of protective chemicals that provoke us into either fighting or fleeing. If, for whatever reason, we are not able to do either our body becomes confused, it has produced chemicals that are not used. If we have a history of being stressed, perhaps reaching back into childhood with parents who controlled us or with whom it was not safe to release our true emotions, then our confused bodies continue to release stressor chemicals in quantities that can now cause us damage. A growing list of common diseases, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, IBS, sclerosis and immunological problems for starters, are increasingly being recognised as having a root in suppressed or unrecognised stress originating in childhood.

Where are we going with this? It’s to say that, childhood stress or not, carrying stress will almost inevitably cause us health problems. There is no such thing as good stress. Even if we enjoy working all the hours and get a kick from constantly feeling challenged by the next big thing, that rush of excitement or pleasure is intended to get us out of an immediately threatening situation by fighting or escaping, not as an ongoing way of life. If there’s stress in your life you may not even recognise it, it may be so familiar to you, but it’s doing you no good. Why not stop for a moment and take stock? Most of us carry stress. What can you do to alleviate it?