Being your own boss has manifold benefits but nobody can deny that it can, at times, be stressful.
The second biggest cause of work absence, stress costs the UK an estimated £13bn a year.
But it exists for a reason.
Stress causes the heart to race and blood pressure to soar. First your body is flooded with adrenalin, then a chemical called cortisol. More glucose becomes available so you have the greater energy levels needed in a testing situation.
Difference between success and failure
This is a normal reaction because your body is gearing itself up to be sharper and more responsive in important situations.
Back when we were hunter-gatherers this ‘fight or flight’ response helped us deal with confrontations with rivals or to hunt down dinner. It was a response that literally made the difference between life and death.
Fortunately, we rarely encounter situations that jeopardise our life nowadays, but our body still responds in this hyper-responsive way to a range of situations that do not involve a fight, or flight. So what, you might ask? You might not be tracking wild boar or fending of a rival, but that extra adrenalin could be the difference between success and failure in closing the deal that keeps your business afloat. If your body never got ‘stressed’ as such, you wouldn’t perform properly in key moments of your life.
Stress can contribute to a range of conditions
Stress can become a problem however when people are overwhelmed by stress and instead of helping them think clearer, it muddles their thinking, sometimes rendering them indecisive.
Stress becomes a problem in some people because their body goes into ‘stress’ mode in relatively innocuous situations, or when it does it takes a long time to return to normal.
“Their body is able to turn their acute stress response on, but is not as good at switching it off again,” says Professor Stafford Lightman, Head of the Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neurosciences and Endocrinology.
It isn’t healthy for your body to be continually braced for danger. It only has so many resources, and when they are all channelled into making you as sharp and responsive as possible, day-to-day maintenance jobs are neglected and unwanted visitors – viruses and diseases – breach its defences more easily.
To use a crude analogy, half of the body’s border guards and maintenance staff have been made redundant because it can’t afford to pay them. Most of its resources are being spent on a military trained to deal with external threats, most of which are imagined!
Behavioural changes
Stress can contribute to a range of conditions. High blood pressure and high levels of glucose increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Chronic stress can also exacerbate obesity and diabetes and lead to depression.
Research has also identified a link between stress and accelerated ageing. Look at the change in Tony Blair’s appearance as his decade in power progressed and you can believe it.
Behavioural changes can be accounted for by stress, according to some studies. Some scientists have suggested that it can make certain people violent or take unnecessary risks.
We’ve talked about what stress causes, but what causes stress?
