Insidious Stress

My last job was stressful. I don't mean "get me the TPS report by tomorrow morning" stressful. I mean working 80 hours a week on straight commission, chasing the dream and feeling physical health effects stressful.

The workload was not a surprise when I started the job. It was a straight commission position where I would be doing direct sales as well as recruitment and development of a team of agents on whom I would get overrides. I know that I would have to work many many hours. 6-7 days a week 7-13 hours a day was known at the outset. This probably would not have been an issue, but the agency I was working for was a newer agency that did not yet have all of its ducks in a row. I could recruit all day, but the systems were not yet in place to make sure that those recruits turned into productive agents, and that is where the stress started.

Stress is not caused by hard work. Stress is caused by a combination of hard work, high expectations and disappointment. I had all three in great supply, and recently left that position.

I did not realize the extent to which stress was affecting me until I left the position and was able to relax and remember what I used to be like before the stress. Below are a few of the symptoms that I did not even realize I had at the time.

Physical Strain

You mean that constant pain my shoulders and neck wasn't always there? The constant mental strain of working 7 days a week led to a constant physical strain in my shoulders and neck. It didn't get quite so bad as to cause headaches, but I would occasionally have trouble turning or tilting my head.

Loss of Creativity

I am normally a very creative person. I love to develop new ideas and imagine where they might lead me. It is exciting and fun. I did still come up with some ideas, but there was no fun or excitement in it. It was just a thing I did. Ideas came, but I lacked the enthusiasm to execute them.

Forgetting Happiness

It wasn't just ideas that I lost joy in. It was most things. At one point, I tried to think back to the last time I had really felt happy, and I was pretty sure it had been months. It wasn't just a matter of being to busy to do things that made me happy. It was that when I did them, there was no real joy in it.

Single Minded Focus

The reason I worked as hard as I did was for the dream that, if I put enough in, I would eventually break through to the point where I would not have to work as hard or be in such a tenuous position. Because I recognized that something was not right, I put every bit of energy into moving forward. Everything else, hobbies, friends, fiancee, etc became a distraction from the all important goal... a goal which was never reached.

Stress is an insidious thing. It comes on slowly at first. After all, work is supposed to be intensive. I enjoyed what I did for work, so why not focus on it. However, it builds slowly over time, and, if you don't have anything to directly compare it to, you don't realize how severe it has gotten.

I am happy to say that now that I have left that position, all those stress signs have faded and I am returning to my old self again. The body recovers quickly from stress as soon as the stressing factor is removed.

If you find that your circumstances are wearing you down, take a good hard look. You can maintain a high stress level for a few weeks or even months, but if there is no light at the end of the tunnel, if your plan calls for maintaining this level for half a year or more, it just won't work. No one can maintain that intensity for that long.

If you are an employer, remember that your employees are usually under more stress than you. They make less money and probably have more pressures. If you want to keep the good ones, make sure to create ways that they can decompress. If you keep them at a constant stress level, be assured, you will not keep them for long.