Jordan Friedman, a prodigious Stress Coach from New York has been developing stress management programmes for over 20 years. Some of the main stressors his clients talk about are money, commuting, and too much to do in too little time. He believes that we are more stressed today than we were 20 years ago. He refers especially to distractions that are technology driven. He concurs that technology can undoubtedly reduce stress, but it can conversely cause it too. There are numerous emails and text messages we must attend to, Twitter feeds and Facebook messages to post, all demanding our attention, which produces a stress response that is often ongoing and continuous within us. We have a compulsive need to be connected all the time. This can take away our time to relax, take a walk and not think about who is trying to communicate with us.
To protect our mental and physical health he advises us to pay more attention to reducing stress. Being stressed can impact our body because it produces wear and tear and when we are constantly stressed our organs and immune system become the punch bags of our stress response. However, stress is vital to our wellbeing as it keeps us on our toes and can be lifesaving in our fight or flight response but if we are exposed to it the whole time it can become corrosive. It can cause our immune system to weaken making it more susceptible to illnesses in the environment. Stress can cause high blood pressure which contributes to heart problems and stroke. It can have an impact on our sleep as when we get stressed during the day it can often make it more difficult for us to sleep at night which results in us feeling tired the next day making us even more stressed.
So, for these reasons it is prudent to take action to reduce stress in our day. It might be as simple as taking 10 seconds away from work to look at a beautiful photo we took on our last holiday and make it our screensaver. Just focusing on that ocean, mountain or beach can alleviate stressed feelings instantly. We can do one-minute breathing exercises, we can exercise, we can take a ten- minute walk in the park. We can meditate each day. The main thing is to find something personal that helps us disconnect and feel more relaxed.
As COVID-19 has sent a lot of us home to work, the three big stressors Jordan´s clients talk about have been reduced considerably. Commuting is no longer a problem. We can get up later to be at our desks on time and even have a freshly brewed cup of coffee by our side! We have more money in our pockets as we are saving on petrol and car maintenance. Having too much to do and too little time to do it is not a problem anymore as the extra time saved from commuting can be ploughed back into these tasks.
So, is working from home in 2021 more stressful than working in the office pre-COVID-19 in 2020? I seriously doubt it!