Stress: is your life a blur?

Sphere 5: Material

· The material sphere is where you find all your “stuff” — all the things outside yourself that affect how you feel. This sphere includes your job, your house, your car, and your credit card debt.

· One part of the material sphere is financial. Having a lot of money is not important. A huge home, luxury cars, and diamonds will not make your life better or help you live longer. However, if not having those things makes you feel ashamed or jealous, then not having what you want could be a problem. Indeed, simply feeling that you don’t have enough can shorten your life.

7.3.2 A Country’s Biggest Killer…

Heart disease is Britain’s biggest killer. Every year, it claims the lives of nearly 110,000 people under the age of 75 – that’s more than one person every five minutes. Taking regular exercise is just one of the vital ways of protecting your heart. These other ways are important too.

· Don't smoke! Every year, at least 100,000 people are killed by smoking.

· Watch your weight! Being overweight puts you at greater risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and other heart problems. If you think you need to lose weight, ask your doctor to recommend a suitable diet.

· Eat less fat, more fibre! Foods that are high in saturated fats (like dairy products, sausages, meat pies, hamburgers, cakes and biscuits) and fried foods increase the amount of cholesterol in your blood. Try to eat more chicken and fish instead of red meat. Grill your food rather than fry. Try to use vegetable cooking oils and low-fat spreads. Fill up on fiber — rich foods like whole meal bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, fresh vegetables and fruit.

· Have your blood pressure checked. High blood pressure can increase your risk of having a stroke or heart attack. Every adult should have their blood pressure checked every few years by their GP.

· Cut down on alcohol. Heavy drinkers are twice as likely to die of heart disease as none-drinkers. Too much alcohol also increases your risk of other diseases such as cancer and liver disease. A unit of alcohol is equivalent to half a pint of normal strength beer or lager, or a single pub measure of spirits, wine or sherry. A safe measure for men is no more than 21 units of alcohol a week. For women, the limit is no more than 14 units a week. It is best to avoid alcohol binders and try to have at least two alcohol-free days a week.

In America they call it hurry sickness. Britain caught a bad dose of it in the 1990s. As diseases go, it’s lethal: in the West, it may be the biggest killer of modern times. But it pursues its victims by stealth. You are probably suffering from it now, as you read this. What’s that itch at the back of your mind, telling you all the things you should be doing? Shouldn’t you be getting out, getting on, getting ahead?

The itch has a name — stress — and the world is suffering an epidemic of it. Work stress is increasing everywhere, says the International Labour Organization, because of competition and change. Surveys have found that a third of American workers seriously considered leaving their jobs last year because of it, and that one in four chief executives of European companies are so worried about stress that they have thought of a different career.

But you don’t leave stress behind at the office. It lurks in traffic jams, crowded tubes, and cancelled trains. It roars at you from motor bikes and heavy lorries, chatters at you through the letter box and over the phone, whines at you from children, barks at you from an irritable spouse. It is implicated, increasingly, in the two great “diseases of civilisation” — cancer and heart disease — which have risen inexorably for most of this century. Stress — defined as environmental overload on an organism — works by damaging or weakening the circulatory and immune systems. Dr Audrey Livingstone Booth, of the Stress Foundation, believes that more than half of all illness reported to GPs is stress related. Gary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, estimates that work stress alone could cost Britain up to 10 per cent of gross national product. Yet for a disease that is so costly in economic and human terms, we have taken a long time to wake up to its dangers.

Дата добавления: 2014-11-29