CASE STUDY

It is 11pm. I’m working on this complex financial model; there are about 20 Excel work sheets; I’m exhausted but also awake and wired. I’ve been drinking coffee and diet coke all day and my nerves feel frazzled. I’ve had on average 4.5 hours’ sleep for the past two weeks. The model doesn’t work, there’s an error in it but I can’t find it. I can barely even look at the screen, it’s all becoming a jumble and my eyes and head hurt.

I’ve been working since 8.30am on the same Excel model with about 40 minutes’ break all day. I’ve probably got two hours of work still to do once I fix this error, but I’ve been trying to fix it for the past hour. If I could think straight I’d probably do it in about 15 minutes but my mind is failing me. I bite the bullet, print out the spreadsheet and struggle on at what feels like half a mile per hour.

Eventually I fix the model, go home and get to bed around 2am. Damn! Only five hours’ potential sleep. I need to be up for 7. So I climb into bed, head on the pillow... And then… I can’t sleep.

My mind keeps worrying. I left with 90% of the work done. The other 10% should take an hour, but what if there’s an undetected mistake? What if some emergency happens and then I can’t finish by my deadline? I didn’t have time to do a sense check of the workings and give it a strategic look. I’ve just done the minimal and was too tired to engage my brain and look at the bigger picture.

I drift in and out of sleep and by the time I actually fall asleep properly, the alarm goes off. It feels like I’ve only had 10 minutes of sleep. I rush out of bed, shower, get ready, skip breakfast (I’ll grab something later) and leave to make it into the office. I’m tired from lack of sleep and stress; my nerves are frazzled. I feel far from my best but nervous energy is propelling me forward. I manage to meet my deadline for the Excel model but there is still the second project. More work piles on and it seems to take me twice as long to get through anything. I’m just cranking out numbers; I’m not providing any critical insight.

Stress is an all-too-familiar companion in our lives. The story above illustrates a particularly difficult time I had at work at the beginning of my career. This stress cycle lasted for about three weeks, during which time I slept badly and the combination of fatigue and anxiety really affected my performance. I started making silly mistakes which cost me time and added to my anxiety. I could not see the wood for the trees and I ended up just doing, not thinking. The result was that both my performance and productivity went down noticeably to the point that the best thing to do was to leave before I got fired. Luckily, as we saw earlier, I got a transfer to a new department and was able to turn things around.

Hopefully you won’t have experienced stress at this level, although I suspect many of you will. But it is a key factor in the working world and one that it is vital to understand and take control of.

There are generally two types of stressful situations we encounter in our non-life-threatening workplace (the other kinds of stressful situations are when you are being mugged on the street by a gang of thieves).

Stressful situation one arises from an immediate stressor, such as rushing around trying to fit two hours of work into an hour in order to meet an urgent deadline, or battling to make the commute to work on time, when there are transport delays and huge queues conspiring to stop you. At such times a stressor – deadline – causes your heart to pump faster and your body to produce adrenaline to ‘get you going’.

Stressful situation two is creeping stress: though you can’t physically see the stressor, you can feel it nonetheless; it is a slower, impending worry, rather than an immediate deadline. This can be caused by things like uncertainty about the future. For example, your firm announces there’s a round of job cuts that will happen in the next few weeks; immediately this concern will be with you in the background.

Whether you are at your desk, lying in bed, or talking to a friend the uncertainty about your job security will put you in a state of worry and anxiety. In this case, you are anticipating a future stressful event that you will need to resolve. The body still produces stress hormones, pumping your heart harder, even when you are not really doing anything.

We know that stress isn’t good for us, but most of us feel helpless to do anything about our stress levels other than the occasional massage or yoga class at the end of the week … or a stiff drink or two.