What is stress?

Those of us of a certain age may remember that “back in the day” an artist called Hadaway had a hit song (do people still use that phrase?) called “What is love?” It began with the lyrics “What is love, baby don’t hurt me’ don’t hurt me no more…”

It seems to me the word ‘stress’ could easily be substituted for ‘love’ in this context. Most people proclaim to experience both, yet might struggle to articulate what they mean by the respective words, and both experiences (love and stress) involve a strong degree of experiencing hurt. An article I read this morning, based on some research carried out at Harvard University, suggests that our experience of stress at work can reduce our life span by as much as three years. Of course there are variables which feed into this such as gender and level of education. It appears that those with less than 12 years of formal education are more likely to be negatively impacted by their experience of workplace stress than those who have reached a higher level of educational attainment.

So looking at what stress is, it seems there are three factors:
1. Perception – As with any emotion, we experience a level of psychological, and physiological, arousal and then we label the emotion based on a range of factors such as context and our own prior experience etc…
2. Control – Looking at the Harvard research it would appear that the more control we perceive we have in our work environment the less stress we are likely to perceive. Perhaps this is particularly relevant to the working world of a PhD where some perceive themselves as having very little control. Important to remember here that what matters is how we respond to what happens to us.
3. Definition of stress – ah yes, maybe this deserves a paragraph in itself.

The Health and Safety Executive and similar organisations provide sophisticated and clear cut definitions of stress. However, these definitions tend to be wrapped up in socially acceptable language. Stress is primarily fear, and we have 5 basic fears:
• Humiliation – which is the fear of what other people think, the irony is that people are too busy thinking about themselves to worry about thinking about you.
• Separation – Being different, separated from those that are important to us, being disconnected.
• Poverty – The ‘I haven’t got enough’ concept… yet money does not bring security.
• Unknown – The fear of new things – or lack of faith, hope and trust.
• Missing out – The fear of keeping up with the ‘Joneses’ – continually making comparisons (but even if you win the rat race you are still a rat).
Whilst we may not be keen to acknowledge it, most of the things which cause us stress in work, or our research, can be reframed into one or more of these 5 fears.  Two universals wo

If you want to explore this topic more please come along to one of our workshops on “Coping with Stress in Research and the Workplace”. The next one will be held on Monday 15th November at 10am, you can book via PROSE. Of course if you are ultra keen you will already have been on YouTube to find Hadaway’s hit from the 1990s.