Stress in Leadership Roles – Identify It

Part 1 of 2

STRESS – You hear this word a lot lately; so much so that it seems to be an excuse for everything that goes wrong in life. Take this sample conversation:

“Hey there, how’s it going?”
“Oh, okay I guess. I had a pretty stressful week at work, and I’m just really tired.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I had several stressful things happen this week and it seems like my mind is always thinking about something. And even when I’m finally able to rest, I still worry that there is something I forgot to do!”
“Wow, I can relate to that completely! It’s so frustrating too, because I slept 10 hours last night and still feel tired this morning…”

Sound familiar? If you are a leader of an organization, whether at work, home, sports, volunteer activities, etc. you probably have learned to accept stress as a necessary evil in your daily routine. But does this have to be the case? A recent article published by the American Heart Association says that more research evidence suggests a relationship between the risk of cardiovascular disease and environmental/psychosocial factors. Factors contributing to stress may include job strain, social isolation and personality traits. While there is not conclusive evidence identifying stress as an “independent” risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it can contribute to high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, smoking, physical inactivity and overeating. Even with rapid advancements in medical care, cardiovascular disease still remains in the top three causes for death worldwide according to statistics from the World Health Organization.

Understanding the problems related to stress is pretty straightforward, but how do you find a simple solution for reducing stress in your life? Go to the self-help section of the bookstore and you will find a plethora of how-to-reduce-stress-in-your-life books. While most of these books present good tips based on quality research, you often end up adding more stress to your day just finding time to sit down and read the book! Unfortunately there are very few things in life under your complete control, mainly the actions of people and events that happen to you. You can however, control to an extent some of the people and events you allow to affect daily life.

Open up your PDA or personal calendar and take a look at all the people, places and times that you have willingly entered into your schedule for this week. Being a strong and effective leader requires careful time management. Since you have become so skilled at managing your schedule, why not take the same approach for managing stress?

To make it easy to remember, take the word S-T-R-E-S-S and develop an acronym:

S – Sleep, T – Turn-down, R – Relax, E – Exercise, S – Sleep, S – Sleep

SLEEP

Notice that the word “stress” has three S’s followed by the same word – sleep. Why? If you can learn to conquer this step, you are half-way toward winning the battle against stress. The hardest part about this step is that sleep and stress affect each other in a cyclic pattern. Worry from stress causes sleep loss, and lost sleep increases stress levels and the cycle continues. How do you break it? Try putting it into practical terms. You typically work five days a week for eight hours a day at the office, and you receive compensation for your time spent. If you must take off work for personal time, you compensate those hours in some other way, such as using sick/vacation hours or working overtime. Why not take the same approach with sleep? Most studies show that adults need about 8 hours of sleep per night, depending on age and gender. A daily work schedule might be 8am to 5pm with lunch break between 12 and 1pm. In the same way, develop a daily sleep schedule for eight hours (ex. 10pm to 6am on weekdays) and enforce it. Now let’s say you have a project deadline that requires more time outside of your normal 40-hour/week work schedule to complete. Your supervisor may ask you to stay overtime until the project is complete, and take off early that Friday. In the same way, tailor your sleep schedule accordingly to make room for unexpected activities (ex. 9pm to 5am or 11pm to 7am). Finally, one day you start feeling some stress-induced symptoms: headaches, fatigue, higher blood pressure, etc. Imagine that these symptoms are the body’s way of saying, “You have an important project that will require extra stress management. You need to sleep overtime this week.” Which part of your schedule will you cut to get those overtime hours in?

Part 2: Stress in Leadership Roles – Defeat It

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