Is it your Job?
Is it your house?
Is it your stock portfolio?
How about the people who love you?
All of those things are valuable (some, more than others - I hope!) but are they the most valuable?
Well, let me put it another way... if you ceased to exist, would any of these assets have any value to you at all?
Think about it - you, are your most valuable asset, because without you none of it matters.
So, how do you protect you, and prevent your most valuable asset from depreciating?
- Practice stress reduction techniques, and try to tame your anxiety and its effects on you and your body.
- Make sure you're getting enough rest, and that you're making time for leasure activities with family and friends.
- Exercise, Exercise, Exercise and make sure that you're feeding your metabolism delicious and nutritious meals full of macro and micro nutrients so that your energized all day long.
To read my previous post on dealing with stress -
Go To:motivatedandfit.blogspot.com/2008/03/as-fitness-professional-i-deal-with.html
To learn more about stress, visit: The National Institutes of Health, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The American Institute of Stress
Related Articles:
How to Quell Financial Anxiety
By PHYLLIS KORKKI
Published: October 18, 2008
The New York Times
Q. Day after day of economic turmoil is making it hard for you to concentrate on your work. You can’t stop worrying about your job security, your retirement portfolio and your whole future. Is this normal?
A. It’s only natural to feel anxious during a financial crisis. But understand that anxiety can distort reality, disrupt thinking and erode performance — unless you take steps to manage it.
“Our minds are trying to protect us by bringing up things we should worry about,” said Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist in Naperville, Ill., and co-author of “The Anxious Brain.” Too easily, though, these negative thoughts can crowd out all others as they replay in an endless loop inside the brain.
“Right now, the whole United States is a little uptight,” Dr. Wehrenberg said. But the feeling is worse for people “who tend to ruminate a lot anyway and have a hard time turning off those worried thoughts,” she said.
Psychologists distinguish between fear, which has a specific cause, and anxiety, which may not. “One of the things that makes anxiety so debilitating is that you can’t entirely put your finger on it,” said Sigal G. Barsade, associate management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on group psychology.
Q. How can anxiety affect people’s work?
A. Anxiety creates cognitive distortion and can make it harder for people to concentrate and to process information, said Myra S. White, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School who focuses on workplace performance. Their decision-making is impaired, and they are more likely to make mistakes, she said. Because they can’t listen as well, they may need to have instructions repeated to them several times. They may also have shorter fuses and become more impatient.
“Anxiety is living in the past or the future; it’s not living in the moment,” Dr. Wehrenberg said, so the work in front of you is bound to suffer.
Q. Can your co-workers have an effect on your anxiety level?
A. It is very easy to “catch” anxiety through a process known as emotional contagion, Professor Barsade said. Densely populated workplaces, she said, are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon.
So if one of your colleagues is moaning that her portfolio has fallen 40 percent and that she will never be able to retire, or another is ranting that your company is sure to go under, be aware that you could “catch” their emotions almost as if they were colds.
“Stay open to both positive and negative emotion,” Professor Barsade said. The key to absorbing negative emotions is “to take them in but not let them take over,” she said.
Professor Barsade said anxiety might be worsening the financial crisis. A kind of collective anxiety — in part emerging in the workplace — could cause people to take overly drastic actions with their money, which could hurt the economy, she said.
Managers need to be aware that their employees are feeling anxious now, Professor Barsade said. They should let employees express their anxiety — and should discuss and clarify the company’s situation honestly.
Q. Are there physical aspects to anxiety?
A. “Anxiety can wreak havoc on the body,” said Dr. White, who has a doctorate in psychology. Physical symptoms, she said, can include a pounding heart, sweaty hands, headaches and indigestion. Anxious people tend to hold their breath and take shallow breaths, she said, so work on taking deep breaths, especially when you exhale.
Yoga, meditation, exercising or simply taking a walk can help dispel symptoms, Dr. White said.
“Any time you’re really stuck in your mind, moving your body helps shift it,” Dr. Wehrenberg said.
Q. What else can you do to tame anxiety?
A. Ms. Wehrenberg recommends this strategy: worry once and do it well.
In other words, if you’re going to fret, be systematic about it and get it over with. If you’re concerned about your finances, for example, meet with a financial planner and decide what steps to take to protect assets as best you can. If you’re worried about losing a job, update your résumé and lay all the other initial groundwork for a job search. Then focus on the job you still have; that is something you can control, as opposed to some horrific future scenario that may never occur.
If you start to feel anxious about your job or your finances, remind yourself that you have a plan and that you have done everything you can do at this time, Dr. Wehrenberg said. Say to yourself, “Stop, I already worried,” then pull yourself back to your work, she said.
“Think about what you’ve got in the now. Today you’re O.K.,” she said. “Focus on what you have instead of what you don’t have.”
She says she has patients who feel that they aren’t allowed to enjoy themselves because of the economy. “It’s not going to ruin your portfolio if you play or go out with friends,” she said.
But if you feel overwhelmed by anxiety to the point that you can’t finish your tasks or are having destructive thoughts or abusing drugs or alcohol, you should seek professional help, she said.
Women's Heart Symptoms Often Blamed on Stress
By Tara Parker-Pope
Published: October 13, 2008
The New York Times
Signs of heart disease are more likely to be blamed on stress when the patient is a woman, new research shows.
In two studies, 230 family doctors and internists were shown sample cases of a 47-year-old man and a 56-year-old woman. The ages of the patients reflect an equal risk for heart disease. Half the vignettes included sentences indicating the patient had recently experienced a stressful life event or appeared anxious. The doctors read the case and offered a diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
When the case study involved standard heart symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath and irregular heart beat, there was no difference in the doctor’s advice for the man or the woman. However, when stress was included as a symptom, gender differences emerged. The presence of stress changed the way doctors interpreted a woman’s symptoms, prompting them to suggest psychological factors rather than physical causes. But the presence of stress didn’t change the way men were assessed.
When stress was listed as a symptom, only 15 of the doctors diagnosed heart disease in women, compared to 56 percent for men. Only 30 percent of the doctors referred the women to a cardiologist, compared to 62 percent for men, and 13 percent suggested medication for women, compared to 47 percent for men.
The findings, presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics scientific symposium, could help explain why there is often a delay in the assessment of women with heart disease, said Dr. Alexandra J. Lansky, a cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.
Upgrading the Stress Levels
By PAUL BURNHAM FINNEY
Published: October 13, 2008
The New York Times
As if the shoes-off routine, charges for checked bags and missed flight connections were not enough, business travelers now have to cope with a global financial crisis that is diverting their attention as well as rattling their contacts here and abroad.
It all adds up to a spike in the unusual stresses that plague business travel, from unfamiliar hotels to sudden switches in travel plans. Experts at the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School along with independent psychologists agree that road life now is more stressful than in the past.
“Back in the 1980s, you could drive to the airport and walk to the gate without thinking of terrorist threats or banks collapsing,” said Rex P. Gatto, a business psychologist based in Pittsburgh. “Now there’s only anxiety.”
In its latest annual “Stress in America” survey, based on 2,507 online interviews in September, the American Psychological Association found that the crisis on Wall Street was the No. 1 cause of anxiety. And participants in the survey said the places where they felt most vulnerable to stress were in the office and on a business trip.
Researchers have uncovered links between the stress experienced by frequent business travelers and dozens of physical ailments, including some cancers and heart disease. A landmark study of some 10,800 employees at the World Bank in 1997 found that those who traveled accounted for 80 percent more medical claims than nontravelers.
In the current economic turmoil, Nancy Molitor, a psychologist in Wilmette, Ill., an affluent Chicago suburb, said that many more of her clients had problems related to stress. “In my 20 years of practice I’ve never seen such anxiety among my banking and business patients,” she said.
The globalization of business had already added to the stresses of business travel.
“When you travel in another country with another culture and try to get multitask projects done to meet deadlines, you can feel overwhelmed,” said Dr. Abinash Virk, director of the Mayo Clinic’s travel program.
Several of the experts said technological advances might be adding to the troubles. “Technology is not the best friend of business travelers,” Mr. Gatto said. “Getting e-mails all day. Doing a deal on your cellphone while trying to beat the long lines at an airport. Frequent fliers just take on too much.”
Dr. Mary FitzPatrick, associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, said she believed “the Internet keeps people in touch more than they should,” adding: “And there’s the CNN phenomenon — a constant, 24-hour barrage of disturbing news.”
Of course, stress is not all bad. It can make workers more productive and resourceful. The physiologist Hans Selye, called the father of stress research, identified “good” stress — the adrenaline rush that helps people overcome obstacles — and “chronic” stress, which may easily turn into distress.
Some travelers are better able to deal with the travails of business trips than others. Take a flight delay of several hours, for example.
“When the word comes over the loudspeaker, some passengers take it in stride — watching TV, browsing the shops — while others can’t stop running up to the counter for the latest update,” said Howard Glazer, associate attending psychologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital. “There you have it — two personality types dealing with the same event. One takes it as a small bump in the road while the other considers it exasperating.”
Stress, he added, “clearly is in the eye of the beholder.”
Backstopped by many medical studies, cognitive behavior therapists are generally confident that there are effective ways for business travelers to handle stress.
One of the most popular treatments is the stress management system developed in the 1970s by Dr. Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine in Boston. His techniques for easing stress range from “meditation on the go” to deep breathing and massages, all described in the book “The Relaxation Response.”
Dr. Virk, of the Mayo Clinic, said she favored taking time out each day to relax. “Go for a walk,” she said. “Think about something unrelated to what you’re doing on your business trip. Wherever you are — here or in Cambodia — exercise.”
“There are executives who travel a lot and can sleep four hours and still be calm,” she said. “Discipline is the key to coping with stress. Veteran travelers know how to break the daily mental process and look at things with a different perspective.”
Are some business travelers getting better at handling stress?
“You have to be,” Dr. Virk replied. “The world now is not how it was. Everything happens at a faster pace.”
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