Hypnotherapist and Psychotherapist, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire and Kent; Genovieve spends time with people meeting, listening, discussing and giving information in helping clients to Understand Stress and Anxiety. From my personal experience I have learnt to cope and rise above many highly stressful events, extending from the death of a loved one, relationship breakdown, divorce, job loss, financial difficulties, sex problems and chronic illness, been pregnant, coped with raising a new child then another, then coping with extended family; also hearing the emotional disturbance from some of my clients, that even retirement can be life changing and daunting and induce extreme anxiety.
Are you experiencing a deteriorating relationship with a partner or friend? Or a grown-up child leaving home, even noticing more or less responsibility at work or difficulties with a new boss, and feels all or one of these circumstances can all take their toll???
Stress and Anxiety is any pressure or accumulation of pressures – physical or psychological – that is too much for a person to cope with comfortably. Therefore, what is perceived as a stress will vary from individual to individual. A Athlete runner, for example, will have no difficulty running three miles, yet that might well tax most of the rest of us beyond our endurance. To understand anxiety, we need to understand about stress, because anxiety and stress are closely connected, though in two different ways. The first, perhaps most evident, connection, is that very many anxiety problems arise because of continuing levels of stress. A musician may thrive on the ‘rush’ of performing live in front of an audience of passionate supporters, whereas just giving a short presentation to supportive colleagues will induce extreme panic in someone else.
The widespread rise of stress
In our busy, modem lives, stress is hugely on the surge. Recent government figures, for example, revealed that work related stress accounts for over a third of all new episodes of ill health. And each case of stress-related ill health leads to an average of 30.9 working days lost; in 2004/5, a total of 12.8 million working days were absent to stress, depression and anxiety. 1 Indeed, sickness absence surveys have consistently shown that 30-35 per cent of employee sick leave in the UK is related to these same three factors. 2 The insurance company Unum Provident has calculated that, between 1995 and 2001, changes in work patterns in the UK resulted in a 50 per cent increase in claims for compensation arising from mental and psychological problems. An another insurance company, Norwich Union, reports on their website that one in every three claims is for mental illness, including stress, and this number has risen steadily over the fifteen years. In short, severe anxiety and fear-related disorders are a major and widespread problem that, surveys show, affect up to 18 per cent of the UK population.
1. Department of Health (1995), ABC of Health Promotion in the Workplace: A Resource Pack for Employees. London: Department of Health.
2. CBI (1995), Managing Absence. CBIj Centre File Survey. London: CBI.
3. UnumProvident (2002), The Uving Insurer. See: www.unumprovident.co.uk
Anyway all forms of stress arise I feel because, in one way or another (for whatever reason), one or more essential physical or emotional needs are not being met in a person’s life. It may be something that happens gradually, perhaps, with loneliness due to the loss of a loved partner or the inability, because of overwhelming shyness, to make new friends -and then builds and builds in an insidious way, taking the light and enjoyment out of life. Or it may be something that happens suddenly, as on those tragic occasions when people, whose lives were working well, are caught up in a natural disaster or become the victims of violence – everything is changed in a flash, and their lives become ruled by fear, making it harder and harder for them to get their essential needs met.
If you continue reading my blogs these coming weeks I’ll inform you more about Stress, Anxiety and effects of Trauma or Crisis in people’s lives. I hope this little insight provides you with some awareness for you or another you can help to rise above the symptoms and do something ‘positive’ to combat and eliminate the effects!!!
