Managing Stress Tips | Dealing With Stress | Stress Reducer Tips

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.

 
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.

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