Can a day in the country sort out your stress issues? Tom Otley investigates
Catching an early morning train from a London station you are not familiar with is not the best start to an anti-stress day. You don’t know exactly where you are meant to be going and you are up against a great mass of humanity in full commuter mode. A moment’s indecision on the station concourse can see you swept back down one of the drains of escalators into the underground system, to bob up somewhere completely different half an hour later.
Yet once you find a ticket machine, the right platform, the correct train and set off, things improve. The carriages are much less crowded than those pulling in, and as you leave the city behind, your shoulders relax. By the time you reach your destination the sun is shining, your eyes have grown accustomed to the green of the fields and the white of the clouds in the blue sky, and you are ready for some fresh air.
I was heading for a stress management course at Careys Manor Senspa in Brockenhurst in the New Forest, a small village of red-brick houses, abundant front gardens and appalling traffic. Once there, 15 strangers quickly made introductions over coffee and biscuits, then sat in an oval, trying not to look like a self-help group.
Our mentor was Neil Shah, a consultant in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy, and a specialist in behavioural change, stress management and well-being for the Stress Management Society. He was a reassuringly normal-looking man who was only just getting over the stresses and strains of having run the London marathon a few days earlier. (I mean it as no disrespect to say he did not look as if he was capable of running a marathon, so it was easier to accept what he said later about the power of positive thinking.)
Shah explained who he was, his background – which includes devising the exercises in the back of British Airways’ onboard magazine, High Life – and the concept behind the day we had all signed up for: “Stress management – excelling under pressure: live more, stress less, re-energise”.
The first half of the morning was spent understanding what stress is and the second half learning some simple techniques to help alleviate it. If, like me, you regard stress as one of those things other people complain about when they can’t cope, then the day is probably very useful, if only from an employment tribunal point of view. For many of the others attending, it was clear they were looking for strategies to help them juggle extremely busy professional and personal lives.
None of us are unique in this – research by the Health and Safety Executive (hse.gov.uk) shows that more than 29 million working days were lost to employee sickness in the UK in 2008-09, 11 million of them caused by stress, costing firms about £4 billion a year and leading to greater staff turnover and lower productivity. It doesn’t seem to be getting better, either. In a poll of 3,367 people conducted by the Stress Management Society last year, 57 per cent reported feeling more stressed than the year before, yet only 12 per cent had taken practical steps to deal with it.
So what is stress? Shah said it was when “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilise”. He used the image of an overloaded bridge, which required either weight being taken from it or extra support added. Early research on stress conducted by Walter Cannon in 1932 showed that when we perceive a threat, our bodies release hormones to help us survive. These help us to run faster or fight harder, delivering more oxygen and sugar to power important muscles, and enabling us to focus our attention on the threat to the exclusion of everything else.
This may have made sense in cave-man times but is not so helpful when we face the kind of small “threats” we do today, such as coming across something that is unexpected or frustrating but still triggers a similar response in the body. At such times the mobilisation of our bodies to deal with the threat stops us thinking laterally, can make us excitable or irritable, and hinders our ability to execute precise tasks. (This is one reason the armed forces and pilots practise certain manoeuvres until they can do them automatically.) What Shah pointed out was that there are very few situations in modern working life where these reactions are useful, since most of the time we actually benefit from staying calm.
We discussed the signs and symptoms of stress and spoke of our own personal bugbears in modern life – everything from call centres and IT issues to the length of the queue at a supermarket checkout and too many emails.
I found it particularly interesting that when we are stressed, our bodies naturally crave stimulants such as refined sugar, nicotine, caffeine and alcohol. Once this would have made sense – if you were in a fight or hunting an animal (or being hunted), stimulants would have helped you to survive that battle. But since many of us spend days, weeks, months or even years being stressed, relying on stimulants is not a recipe for living a long life.
In another analogy, Shah compared the body movements and facial expressions of a sprinter and a marathon runner – and then reminded us that life was a marathon rather than a sprint.
Having recognised what stress is, why it is not quite the positive motivator I had previously thought (although I still had two coffees in ten minutes and noticed that others were smoking outside), we started with some practical techniques to relieve it, some of which can be performed at your desk. These ranged from breathing exercises to positive visualisations and stretches. None of them were too ridiculous, although a few I would only attempt at home or in a hotel room rather than in the office or during a breakout period at a conference.
After three hours or so, the hard bit came to an end and we had an excellent Thai meal in the spa’s Zen Garden restaurant, then spent the whole afternoon relaxing in the Senspa hydrotherapy area – there was a pool, tepidarium (moderately warm room), laconicum (dry sweating room), herbal sauna, crystal steam room, experience showers and an ice room. The highlight was a one-hour treatment, which you could choose from a range of tempting options – I had an anti-stress massage and fell asleep a couple of times, which meant it must have worked.
I left mid-afternoon, not having time to try the gym as I had to get back to London for an evening function. My newly acquired knowledge and techniques were tested head-on when I arrived late and had to listen to the two accountants sitting opposite arguing over the figures on their laptop, and watch another guy treat the table as his own kitchen as he peeled various bits of fruit and left anything inedible strewn around. I just about held it together, but right now, even the memory of it has me taking deep, slow breaths.
? Careys Manor Hotel and Senspa, Lyndhurst Road, Brockenhurst, Hampshire; tel +44 (0)1590 625 217; senspa.co.uk
? Cost is £351 per person. Book five or more delegates for £292 per person. Maximum number of participants is 20.
? Dates: September 23 and December 1, from 9.30am-5.30pm. Bespoke corporate days can be arranged – tel +44 (0)1590 625 218.
Help at hand
The not-for-profit Stress Management Society (SMS) was formed in 2003 by a team of healthcare and professional consultants. It provides individuals and employers with information, advice and support on stress, well-being and mental health issues.
The SMS is dedicated to helping people tackle stress at work and at home using holistic techniques for natural stress management. It publishes a free guide and a regular newsletter, while factsheets on its website offer free downloadable stress recognition and management tools.
The SMS team provides consultancy, staff training, event organisation and stress management services. It also offers an employee assistance programme (EAP) and counselling services, and has recently launched an online health assessment and stress-coaching tool.
SMS delivers its services in accordance with Health and Safety Executive stress management standards. Its team works with companies in both the public and private sectors, offering everything from simple advice to company-wide stress audits. Clients have included Allianz Insurance, City of London, Shell, the NHS, the Home Office and the Football Association.
? Visit stress.org.uk; tel +44 (0)800 327 7697
