Work Stress: Does Your Job Lack “Soul”?

Does your job lack soul? If yes, you probably feel stressed out and miserable a lot of the time, right? And you’re also probably not living the quality of life you deserve.

Well you’re not alone. Work has lost its soul for many people, including those in high paying jobs. Work without soul is work that lacks a loving connection to life. It’s work that involves little if any meaningful connection to other people.

The great Russian writer Dostoevsky explained why work without soul can be so distressing and demoralizing. He put it this way: “Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence.”

The shifting patterns of work brought on by globalization and outsourcing have left many people struggling with feeling overworked, underpaid and undervalued in meaningless jobs. As a result, many people are suffering from a combination of stress, anxiety and depression.

Unfortunately studies show that workplace stress can make your mind miserable and your body ill. It drives many serious problems, more so than any other life stressor, including money, marriage or family problems.

Levels Never Seen Before

Job stress is now at levels never seen before. Men and women are working longer and harder for less money and with less job security and less “job say so” than ever before.

Many people think that outsourcing to countries like India has left American and western European workers cheated while benefiting Indian workers tremendously. But a closer look tells a different story.

Indians working long hours answering telephone calls from America and Europe now show signs of chronic job stress: heart disease, insomnia, musculoskeletal pain and injury, depression and serious family problems.

Stress Hormones are the Culprit: People Just Wear Out

If your work places great demands on you, but offers you little or no control over when and how you do it, then find another job. Because “high demand, low control” work is the worst.

Any kind of ongoing job stress can wear you down and make you ill. But research shows that a high demand, low control work situation can flood your system with stress hormones every day.

What You Need to Do

You can help yourself tremendously if you learn how to do two things relating to stress hormones: 1) prevent them from leaking into your system on a regular basis and 2) flush them from your blood and tissues so they don’t linger and cause harm.

If you learn how to do these two things, you won’t have to be dependent on medications with side effects that take the joy out of your life. With the right “know how” and support, you can learn how to do it easily. Once you feel good and in control again, you can find ways to bring soul back into your work life.

Stress Relief: The “Pack” is Coming

Most of us are hungry to connect to who we deeply are, a connection often made difficult by our family and cultural conditioning. Conditioning sets limits that can keep us trapped in an identity that often swims in a sea of stress hormones-because it’s too small for who we truly are. And living in confinement is very stressful indeed.

Stress Ruins Lives

Valuing and preserving our health and well-being are important parts of a life lived with love, courage, wisdom and passion. As the Buddha said: “Health is the greatest gift”, a gift that we should not take for granted. We need to take care of our health because it’s a priceless asset.

We harvest the greatest treasures of a well-lived, loved, and understood life in the last third of our journey here. To be around for that harvest, we need to know how to safeguard our health and well-being and if we’re serious about doing that-then understanding and controlling stress needs to be at the top of our “things to do” list. Stress ruins lives.

“Chronic stress kills. People wear down. Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death….

Drs. Lyle H. Miller, and Alma Dell Smith, Senior Stress Researchers

Stress related illnesses cause more deaths yearly than deaths resulting from all other causes combined. Our health care system is really a disease care system, so it doesn’t work to prevent stress related illnesses before they occur-it treats them only after they arise.

This is What Stress is Really About

Stress is a biochemical event that involves powerful hormones: cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. When our “inner pharmacy” releases these stress hormones into our body too often or for too long, they become toxic poisons that can make us anxious, depressed and ill. They can even kill us.

The World Health Organization now recognizes stress as the number one health problem in industrialized nations. And as Dr. Paul Rosch, world renowned medical scientist and president of the American Institute of Stress, noted ”

“Stress is taking a terrible toll on the nation’s health and economy. It is a heavy contributor to heart disease, cancer, respiratory distress, lupus and many other life threatening illnesses.”

Studies show that two-thirds of the visits to primary care medical physicians in this country are driven by stress. More than 100 million people are taking weekly medication to manage stress, medication which is for most people unnecessary and which can cause serious side effects and addiction.

Consider this: An article published in the Journal of the American Medical, Association, written by public health expert Dr. Barbara Starfield, identified doctors and hospitals as the third leading cause of death in America.

The Anatomy of Stress

What causes stress? Many things, including, real or perceived, job, family and financial pressures. Our mind and body are an interdependent unit: the mindbody. If we worry too much about financial catastrophe, for example, the primitive part of our brain can misinterpret our worry as actual financial failure and then stress hormones will be released as part of an “emergency alert” reaction.

There are two switches on our body’s involuntary nervous system: one is for ordinary housekeeping chores; the other is for emergency situations.

The ordinary housekeeping switch controls the normal processes of our body such as breathing, digestion and metabolism. The emergency switch is designed to enable us to survive in the face life threatening emergencies by triggering our body’s “stress response,” also known as the “Fight or Flight Response.”

When the emergency switch triggers, powerful hormones flow into our body through a process set in motion by our reactive brain. Our reactive brain cues the master gland of our endocrine system that we are in danger and then another phase of the Fight or Flight Response is set into motion.

What’s Your View?

An often overlooked, but critical, factor in understanding and controlling stress related illness is to address our perceptual tendencies to view life situations as stressful. The way we see things determines our “view.” View defines reality. If we tend to view life events as stressful, they will be.

Stress provoking perceptual tendencies can result from unhealed past wounds or if we are not honoring what we truly want and love in life.

So your own personal growth, as well as your related efforts to safeguard your health, oblige you to become a serious student of your conditioned “views”, of your conditioned patterns of perception. It can be hard to see ourselves clearly and to accept what we see. That’s why this level of inner work needs is best done from a deeply relaxed and self-assured state of mind. From what we call “The Stress Free State”.

The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack

After more than 30 years of work in the best of the western and eastern science and well-being traditions, I created a powerful resource to break free from toxic stress-”The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack”.

The Pack includes 6 of the most powerful stress relief techniques you’ll find anywhere. They’re derived from the best of western mindbody and medical science and the eastern meditation and healing traditions. The Pack includes a crystal clear manual and 18 audios that set up and guide you step by step through each practice so you get its powerful benefits.

“The Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack” also will create the positive conditions within your mind and body that bring inner balance, well-being and longevity. The Pack trains you to live from the Stress Free State,^TM a state of relaxed calm, awareness and self-assurance, a state that flushes stress hormones out of your blood and leaves you feeling renewed and in balance.

Working Without “Soul”

Americans suffer from a great deal of work related stress. We work three months longer than the Germans every year and one month longer than the Japanese. And we sleep 90 minutes less a night than did our grandparents.

But it’s not just working too long that causes Americans work stress. For many of Americans, their work lack “soul”. It lacks soul in the sense that it lacks a loving connection to life itself and to other people. We do what we feel that we “should do or must do” instead of what we “want and love to do”. This is a set up for stress and the health problems associated with what I call the-not-such-a-good-life.

These are tough times and in the short term we have to pay the bills. But we shouldn’t forget a long term vision for our work.

As Confucius told us:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

And as the Buddha added:

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart, give yourself to it.”

The fact is that our soul, our inner life, aches at “just for money” work that lacks depth and meaning. Such work has no connection to all-important “inner spark” that can only be found within our deepest nature. We need to connect to our deepest nature, find our inner spark and set our life ablaze with what we want and love.

When you discover, stabilize and live from the “Stress Free State”, you’ll be able to find your inner spark and set your life on fire.

Get the “Fast Acting Stress Relief Pack” now and start moving into the Stress Free State.

If the Pack is not available on the site yet, then send me an e-mail at drjim@MesicsTraining.com and I’ll make sure you’ll get access to it.

Financial Stress at the Pizza Parlor

Elena is a chef owner of a local pizza parlor. I went in yesterday to pick up a pizza and she looked weary and out of sorts. She asked how I was doing and then she said:

” 2008 has been a rough year for me, very rough.” “All I do is work more and more to pay higher and higher bills every month.” “I’m worried, I hope 2009 will be a better year.”

A voice inside me said: “me too.” It has been a tough year for a lot of people. We’re working more, worrying more, paying more–and we’re sleeping less and enjoying life less. Not good.

What surprised me about Elana was that she was so down. And she looked drained, like she hadn’t had a good nights sleep for awhile. But she’s usually full of energy and very upbeat with a glowing smile for everyone who comes in. This time, however, Elena looked really stressed out.

Just like Elena, you might be feeling the crush of financial stress. No wonder. Just buying gas, shopping for groceries and paying monthly bills can make anyone without a trust fund feel shaky and uncertain.

What makes matters feel worse still is that the world’s financial crisis can make us feel as if we’re on the brink of ruin, especially when the media keep screaming all the bad news details at us—day after day.

STRESS CHEMICALS POUR INTO YOUR BODY

Elena’s getting worn down by daily financial stress. When you worry a lot about money, a part of your brain gets stirred up because money represents survival, and so it triggers the “Fight or Flight Response”, an ancient survival response that’s wired into your body. This wiring is obsolete. It’s meant for a simpler time, a time that’s long gone.

When you are anxious about finances, a part of your brain can easily mistake your worry for life- threatening danger. This mistake triggers the release of powerful stress chemicals into your body, chemicals that prepare you to fight or flee. As if you were facing a life or death struggle with a saber-toothed tiger 20,000 years ago. A part of your brain mistakes your worry about money and finances for actual financial disaster. Not good.

Stress chemicals are powerful hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline. When they get into your blood and tissues and linger there, they can do a job on you. Not only will they make you look and feel tired and wired, they will damage your body, make you anxious and depressed and age you prematurely.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NOW ABOUT FINANCIAL STRESS

So if you are under financial stress, don’t panic or worry excessively. Instead, develop an action plan based on your actual situation, a plan that will empower you to feel in control. Seek help doing so–from reliable sources.

Don’t stay isolated and lonely. And don’t blame yourself. Instead, offer yourself friendship, compassion and generosity. This too shall pass. Make sure to avoid the urge to overspend on travel, meals and clothes so as to deny and avoid your financial worries. Because the aftermath of these “spending urges” will leave you more in debt and so more stressed and more depressed.

Try this instead: Create a spending budget and stick to your plan—no impulse spending. Live within the constraints of a clear budget. You may not like it, but it will lower your stress levels— because it will leave you feeling in control and that will lift your burden.

DO THIS FOR FAST STRESS RELIEF

Try the following deep breathing practice whenever your being dragged out to sea by financial worry:

1. Take three deep diaphragmatic breaths, breaths coming into and going out from an area just below your breastbone.

2. On the out breath–just let it go. Don’t walk the breath out–just release it. If you’re alone–sigh on the out breath, Aaahhhhhh.

3. At the end of the out breath is a relaxed state, it’s calm and clear. Tune yourself to that state as best as possible. It will help free you from catastrophic worry and from getting too wound up.

Be observant. Stay alert. When you notice yourself in unproductive worry about financial stress—just pull the plug on what you’re thinking and feeling and take the three deep breaths.

Think of it as a way of waking yourself from a daytime nightmare. And then don’t follow the thoughts when they return. This takes practice—but it’s a great method. It will help keep your Stress Faucet turned off.

Work Stress: An Epidemic is Destroying Lives