Executive Stress

Gym and Tonic by John Godber

Derby Playhouse, 1996

Britons these days are working harder than ever before, driven by the fear of redundancy, unemployment, the erosion of their living standards and the threat of younger, hungrier juniors swarming up the corporate ladder behind them. The rat race has bever been so competitive, and to stay ahead it is becoming increasingly necessary to put in that extra ten per cent, stay that extra hour at the office, show just that little more willing than the next chap. No wonder middle management is feeling so stressed out. 

What is stress?

Stress is as old as fear itself and comes from the same biological source. Any challenge or imminent threat of danger causes our muscles to tighten and our breathing to quicken, ready to deal with the situation – the ‘fight or flight’ response our cavemen ancestors knew so well. In this day and age our bodies still respond in a similar way to modern challenges like an exam, a heavy workload, a looming deadline and so on, but while the body tenses up ready for sudden physical action, no release follows, and we are left bubbling with pent-up energy. This physical tension in turn reduces blood flow to the muscles causing waste products to build up in the system leaving us at the mercy of the condition known as stress.

Stress can be good. In its positive form it is the tingle of excitement that puts the footballer on his mettle, gives the soloist that edge of anticipation, the businessman the determination to sell his idea at the presentation. Negative stress, on the other hand, is destructive. When the challenge is greater than the individual’s ability to cope, the result is weariness, anger, frustration and depression. Too much negative stress can lead to emotional problems and even physical illness.

In a recent TUC survey, more than two thirds of the workers quizzed cited stress as the main cause of sickness and absence. This costs British industry an estimated £13 billion a year – an average of £12,000 per business. TUC general secretary John Monks commented: “This is clear evidence that people are working more and more in a pressure cooker environment. The pace, the pressure and perpetual changes in management style all add up to a recipe for ill-health.” 

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it

Personality effects the amounts or levels of stress we feel. Some people are more prone to it than others by conditioning and character. Ambitious, assertive people who drive themselves hard (so-called ‘Type-A’ personalities in the language of the industrial psychologists) will be more likely to suffer higher levels of stress than those of a more laid-back disposition. Certain jobs are traditionally more stressful than others too – those dealing with potentially dangerous situations and those beset by continuous deadlines are just two – but in this day and age the life of a busy executive is rapidly becoming one of the most potentially stressful of all, because not only are the pressures self-imposed by the worker keen to get on, but also other pressures are imposed from without, by superiors, by the need to perform and achieve to keep up with everyone else, and the ever-present fear that any failure to match expected standards may result in the sack.

Even outside the workplace, life goes on and external events can contribute to the everyday stress we feel at work. Emotional strain in particular is insidious – divorce, a death in the family, moving house and legal or monetary problems can only increase the mental burden.

Individuals can be their own worst enemy when it comes to stress. One way is by setting themselves unrealistic goals either at work on a daily basis or at home, in trying to be the perfect spouse/child/parent. Relationships are a minefield: especially if you feel you are being taken for granted, ignored, overruled on a regular basis, or constantly coming up against aggressive or manipulative colleagues. The work environment itself can be uncongenial with inadequate lighting, insufficient space, uncomfortable conditions, poor facilities, or unreasonable working hours. The command structure could be imperfect, with ill-defined goals, inappropriate workloads, too much (or too little) responsibility, or having to work with unqualified or inexperienced staff.

If too many people are suffering stress in the same workplace, it can eventually have a collective effect leading to absenteeism, high sickness rates, lateness and accidents. Output will suffer, all-important relationships with clients will deteriorate and there will be a danger of increased internal disputes and staff turnover. And of course, the higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more responsibility for any or all of the above will fall on your shoulders bringing with it, inevitably, more stress. 

Symptoms

Physically, stress can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Stomach upsets and headaches are common. The sufferer becomes restless and fidgety, lacks concentration and may have bouts of insomnia. He or she may even develop a nervous twitch, heart palpitations, high blood pressure and feel constantly on the verge of tears. One’s sex life may suffer.

Mentally the signs are just as recognisable – irritability, a constant feeling of anxiety or inability to cope. Perceiving these as weaknesses, the individual feels a failure and hates himself because of it. He becomes unable to finish one task before rushing on to the next. He may experience feelings of guilt or isolation. Under these circumstances he will probably lose his sense of humour as well.

Increased intake of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine is an external sign of growing stress as the victim tries to calm himself down or console himself with the very substances most likely to increase his symptoms. In reality these drugs tend to make the user more liable to become excitable, jumpy, reckless and/or obsessive.

One symptom of the way modern working practices are causing us to neglect ourselves is that fact that fewer people are taking a proper lunch break. Lunch is physiologically if not psychologically the most important meal of the day, yet a recent Boots survey revealed that a staggering four out of five office workers regularly have lunch at their desks, of which over 70% continue to work while they eat. More than a quarter take a half hour or less off for lunch, while 20% skip the break altogether. Far from increasing output, this costs an estimated £32 million a year as lack of a proper break causes staff to become less efficient. 

Coping

When attempting to tackle stress it is important to address the problem and not the symptoms. At work this will involve finding ways to eliminate or reduce the root causes. Don’t let your colleagues push you around, exercise regularly and eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. And get plenty of sleep. Go to bed an hour earlier, or try cat-napping during the day. Sometimes five minutes with your eyes closed can be more refreshing than eight hours tossing and turning in bed.

Relaxation is also important. It won’t remove the source of the problem, but it will help you deal with its effects. Concentrate on your breathing, your posture, and practise muscle-tensing exercises. The more time you spend consciously relaxing, the easier it will become and the better it will be for you.

And when you’re not physically at the workplace, make sure you’re mentally away from it as well. Do something as far removed from work as possible – read, listen to music, play a sport, watch TV or go to the cinema. In short, find something that makes you consciously spend time on yourself.

And if all else fails, or if you just think it’s high time you deserved a little personal pampering for a while, you could always do what Don Weston does in Gym and Tonic and check into a health farm. Then all you have to worry about is where the money’s going to come from to pay for it… 

PS

As a lifelong worrier myself, I know whereof I speak when it comes to making a night-time friend of stress. As I read this again for inclusion on this site, I recognised every one of the symptoms as being something I used to deal with on a daily basis and realised with a sense of relief how glad I was that at some point I must have managed to turn some kind of corner.

But even then, it’s only a relative improvement. When you’ve been more or less terrified of life since birth, it’s a difficult habit to shake off, and I suspect it’s too late now to suppose I’ll ever know a day completely without fear – of an accident, or that big bloke next door, or the next brown envelope plopping through the letter box, or even an unexpected phone call from an unrecognised number. On the other hand, unlike many, I have been unusually lucky through the years to have around me plenty of loving family, friends and partners to take most of the edge off, most of the time. If anything’s going to get you, it’ll probably be the loneliness.

A geography teacher at school once told my parents I should try to be less tense, as if it were a choice, an option, like choosing whether to specialise in tectonic plates or climate change next term. If only it were that simple. It wasn’t that I had anything to worry about, at least academically. I was what they used to call ‘a model student’: eager, receptive, hard-working, studious and responsive, everything in fact any self-respecting school bully should have felt duty-bound to beat to a pulp. The fact that none ever did I can only put down to a fortuitous lack of tough nuts in my intake, and the only reason I was any of those desirable scholastic things in the first place was simply because I was too scared to be anything else. You were at school to study, I thought, so I’d better study in case someone told me off. And it worked. I got into Oxford, where the sheer volume of study promptly crushed me into my college room carpet from whence it took me almost three whole terms to dig myself out. In that instance it was extra-curricular activities which came to my rescue, many of which you can read about in the Performances section of this website. My first job after university, on the other hand, offered rather fewer opportunities for fun, hence the instant decline.

It was eighteen months of hell spent out of my depth at a London advertising agency. I had no interest in advertising but I had friends in the industry so I hoped we could bolster each other up and maybe have a few laughs while I set about trying to establish myself as a writer. I thought it would help to be on hand in London as that’s where all the agents and publishers were. I hadn’t even tried for the BBC because they only took the brightest and the best, and I didn’t consider the next obvious choice, publishing, because I assumed it would be depressing spending all day trying to drum up fake enthusiasm for other people’s work which was about to get published when mine wasn’t. So you can see I was hardly an ideal candidate for any kind of corporate business at all, but I managed to fool them at interview, so they must have seen something in me.

Whatever that something might have been – bullshit, probably – it quickly withered in the boredom and routine of the trainee account executive’s life. (Sounds great doesn’t it, ‘account executive’. It’s not. It was mostly meetings and dealing on the phone with frantic clients who always wanted more bang for their buck, more of your time and effort, more of everything because they weren’t averse to telling you they were paying your wages and they were being pressured from above too. The trouble was, the in-house creatives you were meant to be liaising with had a similar attitude as well, so you ended up getting it in the neck from self-important bastards on both sides.)

Added to which I was renting a bedsit in a shared house with a bunch of people I’d never met and the daily bus ride to work – the 137 I think it was – took me around Sloane Square (past the Royal Court Theatre) and all the way up Sloane Street to Knightsbridge (where Harrods is). Look at all this, it told me silently every morning with every jerk and lurch; look what you could be doing if you were any good at anything.

The rent was savage even in those days, so I had no spare money and nobody to play with, and so I spent most evenings at home alone. (There was no chair, just a big bean bag on the floor that in time succeeded in wrecking my spine.) But I was usually so worn out when I got in that I would invariably just fall asleep in front of the TV and wake up around midnight too stiff and exhausted to drift off again. So I would lie awake fretting about my life for the rest of the night and shamble into work the next day worn out, white with fatigue, and with a brain as foggy as the Thames in winter. No wonder I once fell asleep in a client meeting. I thought I’d got away with it, though the fact they asked me to resign shortly afterwards suggests otherwise.

So it was all very unpleasant and salutary and while it did nothing for my self-esteem and even less for my prospects, at least it was all over. The pressure, on the other hand, suddenly increased exponentially because now the future really was up in the air. I had nothing lined up – I couldn’t think of anything I could reasonably do that would earn me enough to stay where I was, let alone provide any possibilities for advancement – so I had to come home again with my tail between my legs.

I did spend my last three weeks in that poxy bedsit, though, writing a play for a competition. It came nowhere, but at least I’d managed to finish something I’d started, which I hadn’t managed to do in a while. And it wasn’t even about someone dying of depression and self-pity in a London bedsit, so I’m inclined to give myself at least one brownie point for that. I could write to order and it didn’t always have to be about myself. And my dad even got to read this one. It so happened that it would be the last thing of mine he ever read. He died suddenly that summer, a year before he could retire, and then the misery really began. But that’s another story.

The advertising agency, by the way, did not long survive my departure. The old office building, whose stripy orange carpets I had once found so corporate and sexy, was sold off, refurbished, and turned into a luxury hotel. Good.

(See also this song, for more vitriol about my former late and unlamented workplace.)