Well Stressed by Sonia Lupien

Author:Sonia Lupien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

The Rum and Coke Stage

Things continue. You haven't dealt with your stressor, and you're taking antacid pills, telling yourself that you really should be eating broccoli. The situation that's stressing you continues to weigh you down. You return home every night telling your husband just how much Jenny is stressing you at work. You decide to act. You find the perfect solution for managing this stress. You're going to the spa this weekend with Virginia.

At that point, you talk to Virginia about the best way of standing up to Jenny. She suggests that you attack Jenny's credibility in front of the boss as a way of getting back at her.

You return home Sunday evening, full of energy. You've got a plan, and you're going to implement it right away. You walk around the house telling whoever cares to listen that you're now going to manage this stress with a master's touch, no later than tomorrow! This surge of energy you're experiencing is often a sign you can use to recognize that you're in a state of stress. Faced with this stress, your body is producing a massive dose of energy, and you're feeling the effects. But you've got to make sure at this stage that your method of handling the stress attacking you is the right one, because if the method doesn't work, this massive dose of energy will start to put a heavy load on your shoulders.

You get to work Monday morning and head straight to the boss's office to discredit Jenny's work. But you've got a surprise in store: you discover not only that the boss disagrees with you but that you're the one who has just been discredited by repeating “gossip” (as the boss describes it) to company executives.

At that moment, the boundless energy you woke up to will begin to weigh on you, and a feeling of pressure will set in. You'll start to feel strained and run down. All the energy you rallied over the previous weeks to deal with this stress has had an impact on your muscles, which are becoming sore from repeated contraction. You tell yourself you'll go and get a massage at the end of the day. The perfect antistress solution, right?

Back at your workstation, you realize you're having trouble focusing. You have to read the same paragraph twice, because you're tending to forget what you read after your eyes get to the fifth line in the paragraph. The stress hormones that you've long been producing start to affect your selective attention. You then have trouble differentiating between what's relevant and what isn't in the document you're reading.

When you get back home at night, you open a good bottle of wine to share with your husband over the evening meal. You pour yourself a glass, then two, then three, then four. There's your sign. I call this stage of chronic stress the rum and Coke stage. When you start increasing your alcohol consumption beyond your usual level, this often means you're developing a state of chronic stress going beyond the Pepto-Bismol stage.

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