Daryl Seager, a Business Trainer and Simon Scotting, MD of ‘Shoreline’ in Moscow cast pearls of wisdom about what stress is, and how to avoid it.
What is stress?
Daryl Seager: Stress is basic the body's natural response to any given external stimulus and it really triggers this fight-flight or freeze reaction in us. So stress is not a bad thing, it can be a very good thing, but when we talk about it in today’s world of work it’s when these experiences are compounded. After a stressful situation, your body tends to recover, so for example if a lion is attacking you, you’re going to get stressed, your muscles will freeze up, you’ll have more adrenaline pumping through your system and you’ll be able to react to that situation. But after the danger has passed, your body then returns to a normal state.
So, is a physiological thing?
Daryl Seager: Absolutely.
So if you feel depressed and that leads you to experience a strong stress sure that’s a psychological phaenomenon?
Daryl Seager: As human-beings are primarily instinctive to survive. And that’s what this stress is basically resolved of. So any situation, it doesn’t matter if it’s work, or starting a new business, or whatever it happens to be, you’ll always assessing this situation as dangerous, it is safe for me? How can I best deal with this particular external stimulus? And that is partly a mental process, and then we have a physiological reaction.
Is that why we drink coffee and eat chocolate to speed ourselves up and make ourselves feel a little more edgy and nervous and so stressed-out in a way that we can react to things faster? Is that possibly?
Simon Scotting: Yes, I think so, what Daryl was saying about this fighter-flight mechanism we sort of take to the lesser brain that we have in our heads. I mean, just coming here today, I was in a taxi and sort of looking at the time and saying: “Oh, its going to close at 11” but I can feel myself really focused actually. One more minute is OK, we are this much further and I’m always actually thinking clearer under that bit of stress.
How easy is to condition people? Should we be conditioned to be able to handle stress? Is it not dangerous?
Daryl Seager: I think being conditioned mentally can have benefits, and it also can have negative consequences. I think it depends in terms of what you are dealing with. Stress exists if we go back to the basics of this fight of flight principle. It protects ourselves. If you are then conditioning yourself not to be afraid of something that might work in particular situation, but you might come across one were that is quite devastating. You might end up hurt or possibly killed. If you talk about wild animals, if you think that the rustling in the bushes is just the wind, is nothing.
If we are going to war, we might be conditioned, or we are on drugs? I’m talking about Chinese soldiers before the Tiananmen Massacre, lots of undocumented evidence that these guys were given some kind of narcotics to be able to do what they had to do. You can condition people that always don’t experience stress.
Daryl Seager: Is not that they don’t experience stress, is that it is suppressed, I think. But it then has quite significant psychological repercussions. They’ve been stories in Africa as well of these child-soldiers and they fed a diet of cocaine and gun-powder with alcohol. The healthiest conclusion is to condition them in a certain way. But then you look at the psychological impact after many years and there are huge amount of traumas. So yes stress can be suppressed.
What do you do when you get stressed?
Daryl Seager: I try to lean into it, I try to figure out what’s causing me stress and if I eliminate that or solve that, that will probably make the stress go away.
So you actually analyze why you’re feeling that, what the causes of this problem are, going back to the cause of the problem and it seems to alleviate it?
Simon Scotting: I think more looking forward in the sense of if I get rid of this or I solve this or I do this that will get id of the stress in the future, so that’s going to motivate me to do something now, is the fact that I’ll get rid of this stress, this feeling that I have. And that’s actually is going to help me.
Looking forward. Is that something that you also do, Daryl? To project forward when there is a situation of great stress?
Daryl Seager: I think it depends on the individual. There are different things that you can do when you are stressed, to avoid it. One of them has two parts: If it is a positive thing, as Simon is saying, is going to spear you on, great!, carry on doing that. If it is having a negative impact, then what you need to do is you need to look and stop what you are doing and look at what’s the root of that stress.
