Understanding – The origins of stressMany psychologists and ergologists believe that stress evolved as a primæval survival tool that helped people recall very quickly memories of circumstances that had previously put them in danger, so they could take evasive or aggressive action immediately similar circumstances occurred without wasting time consciously deciding what to do. Particularly useful if you’re a hunter-gatherer who has almost as much chance of being a meal as finding one! Then, as our species began to use complex language – and possibly particularly when an agricultural, rather than hunter-gatherer, lifestyle became dominant – stress became a useful aid to solving intricate problems where a solution couldn’t be found during one “pondering” session, and the problem needed more consideration at a later time. This is particularly useful if you are planning long-term solutions – like when to sow or reap crops or how to feed domesticated animals. But you wouldn’t want to sacrifice this slow-stress for the rather more basic “sudden trauma” system. Therefore, the human mind has coddled together both. So in many respects normal slow-stress is a function of memory – it reminds us to often “ponder” a problem by making us feel a bit anxious about it (thereby pushing it up the list of things we need to think about) so that the problem is frequently recalled from our memory. Once we have addressed the problem for a period, it is then restored in our memory for another time. Excess stress – where instead of helping the individual the stress becomes a problem in itself – is often a dysfunction of memory because the attached level of emotion we feel whenever we recall some anxiety can become so strong that we are too overwhelmed with worry to address the problem itself. Put another way, the emotional cost to our minds becomes too high for the amount of help the stress is giving us either to avoid danger very quickly or to solve more complex (but less urgent) problems. Here’s a real example. David came to this Institute saying he had been bullied for a number of years by his supervisor. He’d made several informal complaints to the head of his department, but nothing had happened. Following a terse, but legally proper, exchange on the telephone with his supervisor, David was now in a state where he was too anxious to open e-mails from her and hid when he saw her coming down the corridor. What we mean by saying that this sort of slow-stress is a dysfunction of memory isn’t that David was over-reacting. His reaction was normal after enduring long periods of excess stress – and employers are obliged to understand that – but it is still true that, from a purely anthropological point-of-view, the emotion that David felt when he saw an e-mail on his computer from his supervisor was excessive in regards to the actual amount of physical danger he was in and it was this excess-stress that caused him to become ill. David described the emotion he felt as at a similar level to that he imagined it would be if the supervisor was threatening actual violence – yet he knew rationally that, in fact, although she could be rude to him, she had never posed a physical threat and would never lay a finger on him. This dichotomy – experiencing a fear level much higher than you know, rationally, you need to stay physically safe, adds to the feeling of hopelessness experienced by people affected by job-stress. You may wonder how our minds can have evolved so that someone can automatically go into a “fight or flight” state just by seeing a sender’s name on an e-mail. Well, the “fight or flight” mechanism - which sends a big package of fear emotion into our consciousness – is very quick, but not very sophisticated. Indeed, to remain very fast, even though much of our mind has evolved enormously, the “fight or flight” system has stayed simple. From an evolutionary point-of-view, that means “simple” has worked very well – reminding us in split seconds what we should do when we experience a danger that has similarities to one we’ve experienced before. The downside of this is that, these days, few of us see much “sudden danger”, but our work-lives give us lots of problems that we need to “ponder” frequently. These long-term problems, like David’s, “pop” backwards and forwards into and out of our consciousness – being retrieved from our memory accompanied by an emotion “bundle” of fear, being considered for a time, then being re-stored in our memory - many, many times as we seek solutions. Unfortunately, one way that our sub-conscious prioritizes a problem is how often it is retrieved from our memory, updated and dropped back into storage. In short, this is one way why the supervisor, who is rather rude to David and lacks people-skills has become, to his sub-conscious, as worrying as if she were patrolling his office with an axe. The Solution The employers agreed to us mediating and this solution followed swiftly: David was moved so that he reported to another supervisor and no longer saw his old one. The employer paid for David to have a series of clinical sessions through the Institute. We confidentially surveyed other employees who shared David’s former supervisor and found that there was an inherent problem. The supervisor was retrained by us over a week and, as is invariably the case, airing her own problems and areas of low confidence changed the way that she worked completely. David gained the promotion that he felt he deserved. David and his former supervisor do now speak. Indeed, she has apologised to him for the level of anxiety she says she inadvertently brought upon him. David doesn’t quite want to return to the old set-up, but two possible resignations have been avoided. And one very expensive compensation case.
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Tackling job-stressUnderstanding - the origins of stress
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