Stress Between Work and Lifestyle

The demands of life and work are contributing factors to our age of anxiety just as much as a person's lifestyle, diet, personality, and heredity. Whenever work or nonwork demands exceed an individual's coping abilities, some form of stress occurs. Stress is any action or situation that upsets the body's normal equilibrium. A person's ability to handle stress is unique and, for this reason, it is not possible to offer easy cures through relaxation, exercise, or improved diets.

Some people have lived to the age of a hundred and yet they have rarely exercised; they have smoked, drunk excessively, and have been frantic workalcoholics. Other people who live seemingly "model" lifestyles may die from heart attacks at a very young age, in spite of their healthy lifestyles.

The more dramatic incidents of the effects of stress at work are seen in workplace murder is now the fastest-growing kind of homicide in America. In Canada, a disgruntled faculty member sought to kill his dean, but killed four others instead. Other statistics-on suicide, heart attacks, and other illnesses-may not be as dramatic nor easy to link to problems in the workplace. Less dramatic but still alarming are the large number of work days lost to industry through stress-related illnesses.

The stress generated from a person's lifestyle is more difficult to define. Is stress more likely for those who have certain personality profiles or who have certain dietary habits? When the overweight actor John Candy died of a heart attack in March 1994, many of us might not have been surprised. Stress has been addociated with so many illnesses that the U.S. Surgeon General's report commonly indicates that two-thirds of all illnesses before the age of sixty-five are preventable. Compared to the costs of treating stress-related diseases, the costs of prevention are relatively small.

Stress is not solely an American phenomenon. We see evidence of it throughout the world. In Japan, for example, corporated stress is rising, and its effects may be exhibited in a different way. It is increasingly claiming the lives of top Japanese managers, according to a chilling report by the Asabi Shimbun, one of Janpan's leading newspapers. To blame are pressures from Western protectionism, the high yen's devastating impact on Japanese exports, the specter of rising unemployment, and an extremely painful period of industrial restructuring for the nation, not to mention a few bonafide corporate scandals.

Work and lifestyle can kill. Preventing this from happening depends on many considerations.