STRESS AND THE HARD-CHARGER

Apr 07 2009

‘Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.’ (Henry David Thoreau)

Hard-chargers, as the name implies, are always on the go—busy, busy, busy. Some of them are impetuous; some of them have half a dozen projects going at once; many set high goals with unrealistic time frames for their achievement and all of them take on more than they can cope with. Because of this and because they are not quitters, they are always in a hurry. This lifestyle of perpetual rushing leads to bad habits.

Bad habit number one is frequent skipping of meals, particularly lunch which leads to a drop in energy and performance (hypoglycaemia) by mid-afternoon.

Bad habit number two is not drinking enough fluids through the day. This leads to dehydration and contributes to a drop in performance. Hard-chargers are too busy to drink, and by not drinking, don’t have to make those time-wasting trips to the toilet, which they claim reduces their productivity. They practice thirst denial so often they no longer experience the subtle message of thirst, only the overt, serious ones.

Bad habit number three is shallow breathing. People who rush, automatically tense all the muscles in their body. Tense muscles don’t expand through their full range of movement. This includes the muscles that facilitate breathing, giving rise to short, shallow breaths that don’t take in much oxygen. A lack of oxygen causes muscles to tense and a vicious cycle is born. Lack of oxygen means the brain and nerves function below par giving rise to tiredness, irritability and anxiety. Hard-chargers tend to perch themselves on the end of chairs and hunch forward over desks, typewriters, computers. This posture further tenses the body and cramps the chest and diaphragm muscles, aggravating shallow breathing.

Because of these bad habits, the hard-charger is always performing below his or her full capacity. The great irony is that the maximising of one’s potential, which is so important to so many hard-chargers, is seldom ever realised by them as they are in too much of a hurry to achieve it. Being of the non-quitter type, they continue to push themselves despite the fatigue and many other symptoms that dog them. The very practice of pushing themselves further lowers their energy and performance levels, giving rise to mistake making and the need to repeat work.

I always remind my hard-charging patients of Aesop’s fable about the hare and the tortoise and I always get them to tell me who won the race. Even with this technique, it’s not easy to get through to the hard-chargers as they are all convinced they are coping and don’t see their lifestyle and attitude as a problem. Their definition of coping is ‘being on their feet and mobile’. They don’t recognise that a body which is racked with chronic fatigue, aches, joint pains, allergies, skin rashes, bloated stomach, constipation, headaches or slow wound healing, is a body that is not coping. So long as they can force themselves out of bed in the morning, they think they are coping and all those symptoms they have, well, they are caused by something else and they will just have to drop in on the doctor or naturopath and pick up a pill or a diet to fix it.

Because we humans are such profound creatures of habit, it’s quite easy to understand the hard-charger’s point of view. They are so used to being stressed they see it as normal. This fact really hit home to me one night while watching a documentary on the Soviet gulags. One of the former inmates had returned to his particular Siberian gulag with a BBC cameraman and was recounting the horrors and privations of living in the abysmally subhuman conditions. I became quite distressed as more of this man’s experiences were being revealed and then became amazed when he finished off by saying, ‘Ah but we got used to it, humans can get used to anything.’ That said it all for me; the penny finally dropped. It’s no wonder hard-chargers argue that they are not stressed even when they are not responding to the Anti-Allergy Program they are so assiduously sticking to.