Stress?

Stress and burnout are two concepts that hold a strong relationship. Anybody who has become seriously burnout will surely have experienced serious and long-term stress in the working environment. The enormous weariness that people sometimes demonstrate during a consult is easily explained as a result of a long-lasting over-effort. But how is it really? Professional cyclists can make fantastic efforts day in, day out and seem to recover amazingly fast all the time. So, men has the ability to recuperate all the time. Then, how come, all of a sudden there is a day that you just can't pull yourself together anymore. Though we know not everything yet, many things have been discovered in recent years.

To really understand what is going on here, we have to travel back in time, to the good old days when our forebears started walking around on two legs on the East-African plains. Not having any instruments yet for either transportation or defence, he had to rely on the own body. At the threat of danger or the necessity for action (a hunt) he must be able to use that body to the full. In professional jargon we call this the so-called fight-or-flight reaction. More precisely stated: the body prepares itself for intense and explosive action. We breathe faster, the heart starts pumping, we start to sweat to cool our body more rapidly. We show all the signs of what we still recognize today as serious excitement. All these fysical reactions are provoked because we start producing in a rapid pace certain hormones, adrenalin and noradrenalin. In East-Africa matters were probably settled promptly and man could switch back to first gear. In our modern society though we have taken to organize matters such that we think our business is stressfull very often, very fast and always longlasting. Whereas we have named the professional situation as vital in our existence, we come upon the "fight-or-flight" reaction there quite easily and quite continuously. Recent research has also shown that an affluent ration of stress-hormones in the body can harm our immunity system. Longlasting stress so leads to a whole array of different minor complaints.

And this now is what I see in my consulting room: People come in with a wide range of different complaints, from headaches and insomnia to ulcers and impotency. By the way, as clients gain insight in the process they're going through and find ways to relax, many of these symptoms disappear gradually in the first one or two months of treatment.