Posts Tagged ‘Causes Of Stress’
Stress caused by rates of change
August 1st, 2008 | 
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Causes of stress are primarily related to CHANGE – change in our working environment, change brought about by death or separation, change in our health, change in our daily living routines – and if one think of the rate of change that we have to deal with in our modern world in comparison with the rate of change up to about 100 years ago, we can realize why stress is so much more prevalent and recognized as a modern disease.
Please note that even positive change can be seen as being stressful – in other words, changes such as getting married, entering a new job, learning a new skill – all positive changes, you will agree, even these changes are stressful. Normally you have a mental map of how the world works, and you have learned certain life-skills to learn how to cope with the world ‘as-it-is’. When a change occurs, you have to learn new life-skills and even worse, break down your current mental map and rebuild a new one to help you cope with the change in your world.
Now, if we look at the rate of change that we have to cope with in modern life versus the rate of change that our forebears had to deal with, we can come to understand the amount of stress that we are really under.
Let’s look at the following four factors of the modern world contributing to stress
1. The rate of change that we have to deal with
2. Technological stress
3. Information overload
4. Interruption overload
1. The rate of change.
There are quite a few references to the fact that the rate at which change is happening in the world has increased dramatically.
Alvin Toffler, in his book Future Shock, said that future shock is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”. He went on to write another book about “The Third Wave” – where the ‘waves’ can be seen as periods of human activity – how the world works. As you can see, the time span in which the Information Age is measured is in decades where previous waves were measured in hundreds and thousands of years – this is an indication of the rate of change that we have to deal with.
| WAVE | PERIOD | ACTIVITIES | TIME SPAN (years) |
| Hunter/ Gatherer |
Nut/berries/ game |
Tens of Thousands | |
| First Wave | Agriculture Age | Farming | Thousands |
| Second Wave | Industrial Age | ass production | Hundreds |
| Third Wave | Information Age | Specification/info | Decades |
2. Technostress.
A type of stress associated with this increasing rate of change is known as Technostress.
Wikipedia identifies technostress as the inability and associated stress that goes along with adapting to change in the technological world. It is the type of stress (loss of self-esteem!) that you experience when you cannot program your DVD player and your grandson has to do it for you. That is the old-fashioned example. A more modern, updated version would be the loss of self-esteem that you experience when you have to use your cell-phone and you cannot understand all the options.
3. Information overload
Hand in hand with the increasing rate of change is the increasing amounts of information that we have to process.
One just has to look at the following quote:
“Did you know that more new information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous 5,000? A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than average people in seventeenth century England were likely to come across in their lifetime. The amount of information available in the world has doubled in the last five years, and it keeps doubling.”
(Source: “Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know,” by John C. Maxwell. Nelson Books, 2002. ISBN: 0785264191)
All of this information that must be processed ads to our levels of stress, since it increases the decisions that we have to make, as well as informing us about the increasing amount of change in the world that we have to deal with.
4. This can lead to Interruption overload
In an article written in the Financial Times in August 2006, spoke about the concept of Interruption Overload. Due to the invasive use of technology such as email, cell-phones, blackberries, Instant Messaging and other instant communication devices, it is easier and easier to communicate – but these communications are often intrusive and impinge on an individual’s time and concentration. People are constantly being interrupted in the tasks that they are doing. It is estimated that it takes about 15 minutes to re-immerse yourself in the task that you were busy with before the interruption. All these mini-changes that you have to deal with, the extra pieces of information, the additional decisions, can add to stress if you feel that you cannot cope with it any more.
The bottom line is that our forebears had to deal with surviving the saber tooth tiger, we have to deal with surviving the computer mouse.
Tags: alvin toffler, Causes Of Stress, future shock, health change, hundreds and thousands, information age, information overload, new job, period of time, personal perception, positive changes, third wave, time span, working environmentRelated posts
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Causes Of Stress Overview
In the broadest scheme of things there are two types of stress - the type is largely self-induced and the type that causes you stress due to unforeseen or foreseen life-changing events.
Self-induced stress is largely due to your personality. Some personality types are just more inclined to ’stress themselves out’. This type of stress is mostly due to working too hard, having too little time, feeling out of control the whole time…
The other type of stress is due to major life-changing events that you might, or might not have control over. Some examples of events that you have control over are getting married, moving house, having a new baby. But then there are those events that you have no control over such as illness, death of a loved one and so forth. BOTH these types of events are stressful, even the so-called ‘happy’ events. The reason for this is that a change in life-style disrupts your routine, it destroys the mental map that you had of the world and it forces you to create a new map. Coupled with this can be extreme emotions such as grief, anger and feelings of loss. Altogether, these feelings add up and can cause stress - feeling of anxiety and fear, depression and anger.
These types of changes can be broadly grouped into these four categories:
- Family
- Personal
- Work
- Finances
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Causes Of Stress
In a nutshell: Stress is caused by changes. Changes affect your life from the moment that you are born - some changes are good, some are not so good, but all of them cause stress. You have to adjust to the new way of doing things, your old world is disturbed and you have to create a new mental map of the world.
Some changes can be predicted and controlled, others are not so under control.
Read more about the causes of stress here:
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Managing Stress Tip - Just say ‘No’
One of the biggest causes of stress is not having enough time to do everything that you are responsible for - or that you feel you are responsible for.
The problem is that some people, especially if your personality type is such that you are a ‘people pleaser’, or if you have a slightly low self-image and therefore crave the approval of other people, just cannot say ‘no’.
This could range from anything from favors asked by relatives - to babysit your awful nieces and nephews, or to act as taxi for your old aunt Edna and take her shopping for hours; to extra work dumped on you by your boss or by your co-workers.
This can lead to a major source of stress. You might feel taken advantage of, and the extra tasks might just be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, so to speak.
It is essential that you take a good look at the factors that are causing you stress, and if lack of time, or the feeling of being drained due to constantly having to pander to the demands of family and friends, are contributing to you feeling stressed, you just have to learn how to say no.
The funny thing is that you really do NOT need to explain your reasons, however, if you feel a bit daunted and feel that it would be incredibly rude to just say no outright, you could possibly try by saying that you cannot do XYZ right now, but you will think about it. That is a nice polite way of dodging the issue. The problem of course is that it has not really gone away and the persistent family member might just take you up on the ‘later’ bit, however, just be consistent and persistent in saying ‘no’ and they will soon get the message.
This might sound harsh, and believe me, I sometimes have difficulty in following my own advice, but lack of time and being over-committed on tasks are the major contributors to MY stress levels and mentally I realize that saying ‘no’ is one of the best ways of reducing stress levels.
Come on, be a bit selfish. It might just be the best thing for you to do sometimes.
Tags: Causes Of Stress, lack of time, Managing Stress, people pleaser, personality type, reducing stress, self image, source of stress, stress levels, stress tip