Stress kills - let’s manage it effectively

Although experiencing stress is part of being alive, it can become overwhelming, causing daily dysfunction and even leading to serious health complications.

While stress itself is not a problem, experts say it becomes a problem when it is left to run rampant and starts holding one back from experiencing his or her full potential.

For example, the stress of taking a test can help motivate a person to study, show up on time, and work their hardest to succeed.

But if stress isn’t something a person knows how to handle, cope with, or control, it can work in the opposite way.

So therefore how can one know he or she is stressed?

What is causing the stress?

How does he or she handle stress?

All these questions need to be answered, if stress is to be handled and dealt with effectively.

Stress is defined by the World Health Organisation as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation.

While stress is a natural response to perceived danger, new, challenging, or threatening situations, chronic stress can lead to physical and mental health complications and early death.

Chronic stress is also associated with heart disease and dysfunction (including heart attack), digestive disorders, memory disorders, diabetes and cancer.

Stress results in other health conditions such as muscle tightening and tension, rapid breathing or shallow breathing, heart rate increase, blood pressure increase, anxiety, depression, pain and fatigue

Current statistics indicate that work-related stress is a direct factor in around 120,000 people's deaths every year, while the International Labour Organisation states that stress, overtime and disease contribute to the death of 2.8 million workers every year.

Also, according to the Head of the Department of Human Resource Management of All Nations University (ANU), Dr Priscilla Bempah Botwe, 77 per cent of college students worldwide experience moderate-to-severe psychological distress, with 35 per cent diagnosed with anxiety and 20 per cent with depression.

These statistics are frightening.

The Daily Graphic thus believes that stress is a matter that needs serious attention in workplaces as well as educational institutions.

Many workers have been sent to early graves due to their poor management of stress, while the statistics are staggering for workers who only retire to die in less than five years.

Students are also, most times, under so much stress keeping up with studies and examinations but little attention is paid to their emotional and psychological needs when school is in session.

This makes students end up ill and emotionally distraught, especially during examination period.

We, therefore, couldn’t agree more with a clinical psychologist at the Eastern Regional Hospital, Akosua Serwaa Bonsu, who, last week Wednesday at ANU in Koforidua, enjoined employers to take stress management seriously to ensure the well-being of employees.

We also associate ourselves with her call for attention to be given to the mental health needs of young people, especially students, as she inaugurated an 11-member executive body of the Human Resource Alumni Association of the university.

It is quite frightening, her assertion that the mental health challenges in the country were youth-related and that the behavioural addiction among students, such as betting, watching pornographic materials and the counter-productive use of the internet, were compounding the issues.

Indeed, we need to attach more importance to the mental health needs of students by following the example of the university and also ensuring that human resource officials in organisations offer opportunities for talks with employees and also inquire about their psychosocial stressors for prompt intervention.

We must ensure workers and students enjoy good mental health, by deliberately paying attention to their emotional and psychological needs, so that no one is overawed by stress in the line of duty or during studies.

Failing that will always have disastrous consequences as have been experienced in several places.