Stress in office
Stress at home
By Kuldip Dhiman

THIS is his thirty-third cigarette and the sixteenth cup of coffee. As he wipes the sweat off his face with a tissue, he swallows another pill. The one that he took an hour ago seems to have had no effect. He again reads the warning letter that he got this morning from his head office. His days in this organisation are numbered. Home is another hell with a wife who does not seem to love him anymore. She is probably seeing someone, and he can’t do anything about it. He begins to sweat profusely, his mouth gets dry, his body begins to quiver, and as darkness begins to engulf him he manages to dial a number, ‘Is that Dr. Trehan’s Clinic?’

In another area of the city a thousand-metre race is on. The girl in blue is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Owing to personal problems she had not been able to concentrate on her career. This is her last chance. She has to do something to qualify, otherwise her career will come to an end. Other girls are running neck and neck with her. She begins to lose hope. No, she will never make it, no, no, no. But when the finishing line is just a few metres from her, she suddenly shoots past the rest and crosses the line.

Although she was a nervous wreck when the race began, from where did she get that extra energy to succeed? And why is our bright executive such a failure? And is there anything common between the two? Yes, although one has succeeded and the other failed, both were under extreme stress. The difference is while our athlete managed to direct her stress towards success, the executive failed to harness it, and in the end destroyed himself.

‘Contrary to popular belief,’ psychotherapist Arthur Rowshan points out, ‘stress is not always bad; it can be an effective motivator that adds spice to your life. Olympic athletes don’t normally break records during training, nor do actors give their best performances during rehearsals; like every one of us, they are at their best when invigorated by the stress of performing before the eager gaze of a watchful audience.’

It is surprising that our body reacts to favourable and unfavourable situations in more or less the same way. Whether you get a raise or are fired, whether your love is reciprocated or rejected, whether you win a battle or lose one, your physical response to stress is the same: the fight or flight response. That explains why some people under stress soar the heights of achievement under extreme stress, while others sink to their lowest depths of despair.

While too much stress could lead to disaster, an optimal stress level is a natural requirement of life, and the optimal stress level varies from person to person and time to time. Animals that are brought up with all external stimulation removed, such as challenge, adventure and danger, tend to pine away and even die. And experiments on volunteers kept for a considerable period of time in a stimulus-free environment have shown that they tend to regress to an infantile stage. Just as the strings of a musical instrument need to be tight enough for it to function properly, our bodies and minds, too, need to be stressed to a certain degree in order get the best out of life.

But why do we experience extreme stress? Can it be avoided? Since this world was certainly not made to make our life comfortable, we are confronted by difficulties at every step, and most of these difficulties are associated with work, or the lack of it. And if some lucky souls have an easy life, they create difficulties for themselves in order to make life interesting. With the onset of the modern age, man is no longer the sole provider; more and more women are joining the workforce for reasons other than financial. Since the traditional equation has changed, it has had its positive as well as negative effect. But it would be erroneous to believe that stress is mainly the outcome of rapid industrialisation and urbanisaion, and that people in villages and primitive societies that have fixed roles for men and women are free of stress problems. This was reflected beautifully in a New Yorker cartoon that showed a character looking at a primitive society and saying: ‘They have neuroses and are not even civilised.’

And do men and women handle stress differently? The common belief that men are level-headed, calm, and sober; and that women are emotional, impulsive, excitable has come under attack by psychologists Robert Levenson and John Gottman. They believe that contrary to reputation, men registered as much emotion reactivity as women did. They in fact concluded that husbands may actually be more emotional than their wives, and that men stonewall precisely because they are less able to handle emotional situations.

In order to study how middle-class working couples are coping with the growing pressures of modern urban life, a study was recently conducted in Chandigarh, Mohali, and Panchkula by an Indian development psychologist, Dr. Suman Verma, in collaboration with Dr. Reed Larson from the University of Illinois, USA. Fathers, mothers, and eighth graders in a hundred urban middle-class families took part in the study that used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a novel research procedure that circumvents limitations of the laboratory and survey methods that are used in research. The behaviour of people in laboratory studies, often differs from what goes on in real life. The subjects carried with them specially designed watches that sent a beep at random times. In order to capture their emotional patterns, the participants were given a series of standard questions on the ESM report form that included objective situation – where they were, with whom, and what they were doing, But the researchers were equally interested in their participants’ subjective situation, that is their internal experience. Hence the ESM form posed a set of questions about what their emotions and other subjective states were just before each beep. A scale of overall ‘mood’ or ‘emotion’ to draw the main outlines of emotional states was used, and the participants themselves rated their experiences.

"We first examined fathers’ average states in the global" spheres of job and home,’ explains Dr. Suman Verma, "What emerged clearly in the study was that men’s jobs imposed a pattern of demands, stresses, and frustrations that structured their emotional lives. Men reported more frequent experiences of distress at work than at home. They also reported more frequent distress at work than employed women did. The focal comparison between job and home showed a pattern of engagement at work and more favourable emotional experience in the home sphere. At their jobs, fathers reported feeling significantly higher levels of attention than they did at home. They rated their activity as more important, and they reported feeling challenged and hurried. Though sometimes stressful, and eliciting negative emotions, their jobs were an important source of self-esteem and personal satisfaction to many of these fathers. Interestingly, fathers who reported the highest levels of attention at their jobs also reported higher levels of negative affect. Their level of investment may set them up for anger and unhappiness when their goals at work were frustrated.

In contrast to their jobs, home was a place of leisure, relaxation and recuperation. "Given that fathers have put in their effort at the office," Dr. Verma adds, "they claim the right to relax and enjoy themselves at home. Father’s time on family work is one sixth that of their wives. Fathers appeared to make small adjustments if their wives were employed: amount of time on family work was 4.5 per cent if wife was not employed, 6.7 per cent if she was.’

And what about women? How are they coping up with their new-found role as working women? Analysing women’s emotional responses at home and at work, Dr. Verma continues: "The pressure has shown a great deal more on women than on men, and the working woman is the most stressed and is the worst sufferer. Our studies tried to find out how well working women manage stress. It didn’t come as a surprise to us that they were experiencing stress to such a degree that that their emotional states are very, very low. The graph depicting working women’s stress literally dips especially during the afternoons and evenings because after a hard day at work they come to do their second shift -they have to look after the children, do unfinished household chores. Then the husband arrives and the demands he makes. And men hardly help women with housework because for them office is for struggling and achieving, but home is for recreation and relaxation. This is a clear-cut trend that hasn’t changed over the years. Their attitudes have shown a gradual change, yet it doesn’t show in their investment in devoting more time in housework and helping out their partners who have had an equally hard day at work."

It was noticed that women who had more choice in going about their office work and more freedom to make decisions, showed more positive emotions at work than women who didn’t. What is significant is that in cases where the family was supportive, women felt a lot better. The misery was magnified if there was marital discord, or other tensions associated with domestic life. "The thing is nobody minds the extra money that the working woman brings home," observes Dr. Verma, "as long as she does not neglect her regular duties." But if the dinner was not ready on time, then there was a big problem. Adolescents also made it quite clear that they would rather have their mothers all the time with them. So the working woman has to cope up with all the pressures of a professional worker and also all the strains of being a housewife. Strains of looking after her family, in-laws, socio-cultural problems, cooking, cleaning, and so on. To make matters worse she also takes on the stress that her husband may be experiencing at work. And worst of all she is internalising all this because she has not been taught how to handle stress. The negative fallout of all this is that in the end most working women have no time left for themselves; leisure, hobbies, socialising etc. And this is one major reason for their being in such a state of distress. The working woman is trying to create space for others, making adjustments, but in the bargain she is losing out on her own space.

The findings of this study suggest the need for more research on Indian fathers as well as fathers in other cultural settings. There has been much research on women’s position in Indian families, partly because of pressing injustices, but a fuller understanding of family dynamics and efforts to change families require that we understand men’s roles and responsibilities in changing social scenarios.

Since working couples are increasingly experiencing stress at work and at home, is there something that they can do about it? When things appear to be heading towards disaster, it is time to take a long hard look at ourselves in order to assess where we are most vulnerable to the impact of stress, and how we can either deflect it or deal with it. We need to review our ambitions and plans for the future. Most of us do not have a balanced picture of ourselves, and as a result we at times set goals far beyond our reach. And one fine day it may dawn upon us that that in pursuit of achievement, the balance between the stress cost and the reward has slowly but steadily shifted to a point at which the price we are paying in risking our very lives far exceeds the real rewards we are getting, or are ever likely to get. If this is the case, it is time to revise our goals, and realign our forces. We may even have to change the course of our lives amounting to no less than a virtual about-turn. And if we really have to do this, we need not feel ashamed or guilty about it because if the price for being the first in the rat race is a heart attack or a nervous breakdown, then it is really not worth the while. Not everyone can be a Ravishankar, or an Albert Einstein. Winning or losing is not as important as playing the game to the best of our ability.

What can a person do to reduce stress, or better still prevent it? Cultivating a hobby, sport, reading, listening to music, or any activity that you enjoy might reduce the impact of stress. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion". In the same vein it could be said that all families have their own problems and they should find solutions to them in their own fashion. What worked for your neighbour may not work for you.