Untreated Stress can kill

Stress can kill you of that there is no doubt. By this I do not mean that it is a great joke and as such can kill you in that way. I am talking here of an involuntary premature short cut to the hereafter (or wherever your faith and belief takes you) that at this moment in time I would not wish on anyone. Stress should not be ignored and certainly not left untreated.

It is a sign of our times that excess stress would appear to be everywhere nowadays and can manifest itself in a number of ways. I guess there is a price to pay for everything and the side effect of our new found wealth and affluence is the extreme stress that we find ourselves having to go through to maintain these levels of economic comfort.

The downside of all of this is that we find ourselves becoming more and more isolated from each other and more and more dislocated from reality.

I was listening the other day to an interview on the radio whereby an expert in telecommuting and portable flexible working was debating the positive and negative aspects of this new type of work with an academic who was taking the opposite view that mankind is actually a sociable type of beast and we actually need social interaction to help supply the sort of safety valve to counter too much introspection and isolation that the new economy provides.

It is actually very true that we do need the office environment and the social interaction that this provides even if only to remind ourselves that we are not alone and that there are people out there.

Which leads me back to the starting point about excess stress and the downside of it all if left untreated. Left to its own devices, excess and untreated stress sneaks up on you and whereby the normal channels exist in the normal environment to either release or provide the mechanism for release, when we work alone those normal channels do not exist.

If you are telecommuting or working from home who is there next door to go and vent your frustrations, share your angst with over the extremely annoying and irritating client who has just knocked back your proposals for the umpteenth time merely because they couldnt be bothered to read the fine print of the previously agreed job specification that you so lovingly provided?

We are, as has been described, social animals that need the interaction of others. Those others also provide the ability as points of first warning to alert us when there are potential problems looming on the horizon and we are in danger of disappearing into holes of our own creation.

An inability to spot these potential trouble spots can lead to all sorts of pressures that in turn can manifest themselves into extreme stress that if not spotted early enough can be extremely difficult to deal with afterwards.

Stress left to its own devices can be a problem and completely left to its own devices for a long time can kill sooner rather than later.