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Health and Well-being

Self-Assessment Quiz: How Stressed are You?

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The first step to overcome the causes and effects of stress is to acknowledge stress and become aware of its symptoms. By identifying the following telltale signs of stress, you can take steps to manage them.

Evaluate your level of stress by taking a simple quiz that I developed recently. Rate your experience against each category of stress symptoms in the following list. Score 1 for “Rarely”, 2 for “On occasion lately”, 3 for “Often” and 4 for “A lot lately.”

  • Irritability, nervous temperament, moodiness, short temper, aggressiveness
  • Lack of enthusiasm, neglect of responsibilities
  • Inability to relax, concentrate, focus, or remember
  • Poor health, body aches, pains, indigestion, constipation, nausea, etc.
  • Eating and sleeping more or less, poor hygiene, substance abuse
  • Nervous habits: fidgeting, foot tapping, nail biting, giggling, etc.
  • Excessive frustration, cynicism, paranoia, distrust or worry
  • Feeling of loneliness, withdrawal from friends and family
  • Reluctance to express opinions, feeling of being “used” by others
  • Excessive sensitivity, feeling of being overwhelmed
  • Indecisiveness, poor judgment, unwillingness to take risks, impatience
  • Blaming self for problems, evoking past distresses or sorrow demanding attention, aggressiveness
  • Feeling of lack of control and authority, pressure to yield to demands

Assess Your Level of Stress

Tally up your scores and rate yourself on the following scale. The more symptoms you observe in your everyday life, the more stressed you are.

  • 18 or lesser indicates a normal level of stress. Stress is an essential part of existence.
  • 19 to 25 indicates that you may be facing a brown-out. The temporary hardships you are experiencing may intensify your level of stress if you do not address their causes immediately.
  • 26 to 34 indicates acute level of stress. Carefully address everything that bothers you and consider changes to your lifestyle. Seek therapy.
  • 35 or greater indicates potentially serious consequences to your wellbeing. Seek medicinal or therapeutic help.

Work-Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”

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Brad Feld on Work-Life Balance

Here is an excellent podcast (summary here) where Venture Capitalist Brad Feld discusses his thoughts on the concept of work-life balance. He also shares the changes he implemented to achieve more balance in his life. Also, see a previous article by Brad on this very topic. Here are key takeaways:

  • The sense of busyness is not the same as the sense of achievement.
  • Balance is an important issue to consider at all ages, as many make the mistake in believing they will “get the balance on the back half of life” and find it shorter than they hoped (“you don’t know when the lights are going to go out (when you are going to die.)”)
  • Work-life balance is an important issue to everyone, yet each person’s approach will be different. There is no one-size fits all approach.

Work-Life Balance is an Individual Choice

Balancing the various demands on our time is by no means easy. It is unrealistic to establish a ratio between ‘work’ and ‘play’ time to pursue the sense of balance.

Balance is an individual choice you have to make based on your personal and professional values and associate relative priorities between these values. Here are five essential guidelines to make such choices.

  • Don’t become a slave to your work. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Work is a means of living, it is not life itself.”
  • Slow down your life and develop mindfulness. Simplify your life and inculcate discipline. Focus on the simple things. Control your wants and meet your core needs.
  • Talk to your family and friends and explore ways to introduce more fun into your daily routine.
  • Sleep more. Help around the home. Go on more vacations. Cultivate a hobby or two. Volunteer for a good cause. Do something meaningful with your spare time.
  • Learn to control how you react to other people and their demands on your time, money, or both. Consider the cost on your own resources and become skilled at how to refuse unimportant demands.

Realizing the balance in your life is your prerogative.

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  2. Why You Can’t Relax on Your Next Vacation
  3. Disrupt Yourself, Expand Your Reach.
  4. Do Your Team a Favor: Take a Vacation
  5. Busyness is a Lack of Priorities

Health and Fitness for the Sedentary Professional

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Busy professionals tend to live a deskbound lifestyle. Their hectic schedules develop into easy excuses for abandoning regular exercise patterns. Consequently, their sedentary lifestyles, when combined with insufficient sleep, a disregard for healthful eating and drinking habits and the greater levels of stress in the modern workplace, can lead to fatigue and ill health over time.

Here are nine simple suggestions to encourage the busy professional lead a healthier lifestyle at work.

Practice Simple Workouts

  • Consider a healthier commute. Bike or walk to work at least once a week. If you ride a bus or train, get off a prior stop and walk the remainder.
  • Take stairs instead of elevators. Research suggests that climbing stairs can burn as much as seven times the calories burned when using an elevator.
  • Seek out opportunities to stand or walk. Walk up to colleague’s desks instead of instant messaging, emailing, or calling them. Take longer routes to restrooms, water fountains, meetings rooms, and others’ desks.
  • Take walks during breaks or after lunch. Consider starting a lunchtime walking group with like-minded coworkers. Walk for twenty minutes at a nearby park, around your office building or in the hallways. Better yet, take the stairs to walk up a few flights. Doing exercises in a group is more enjoyable and helps sustain the habit.
  • Stretch at your desk. Adopt a handful of simple exercises to stretch your fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders, chest, neck, back, and legs. Although these activities do not contribute to any form of serious aerobic exercise, they are nevertheless advantageous to promote fitness and reduce anxiety.

Eat and Drink Healthier

  • Eat healthy. Do not skip breakfast or lunch. Favor full-service salad bars or healthy choice menus at company cafeterias. Better yet, pack your lunch — it is economical too. Regulate your eating when dining-out with customers, visitors or management — studies suggest that we tend to overindulge in social settings or while on expense accounts.
  • Keep a supply of low-calorie, nutritious snacks, raw vegetables and fruits at your desk. These serve as healthier choices to snack food usually stocked in office vending machines.
  • Avoid indulging in sugar- and calorie-laden pastries, pies, cakes, cookies doled out on birthdays and anniversaries, or spread out in break rooms.
  • Drink more water. Try to limit carbonated beverages and fruit juices to one can/bottle a day. Avoid caffeine in the evenings to prevent sleep deprivation at night — the half-life of caffeine is about six hours.

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  3. Start the Day with a Workout
  4. How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life
  5. The One Simple Habit Germans Swear By for a Healthier Home

Working Exercise into a Busy Day

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The benefits of physical activity and exercise are well known: reduced risk of chronic diseases, lower stresses, increased physical fitness, improved sleep, greater self-confidence, etc. However, incorporating physical activity into our demanding schedules can be very challenging.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal offered five great guidelines to help include exercise into a busy day. See the full article here.

  1. Exercise early in the morning. Typically, after work, you’re hungry, exhausted and you have family obligations. Exercising early in the morning can give a great energy boost.
  2. Stay close to home or office for convenience. If possible, possess exercise equipment at home.
  3. Mix exercise with family time. For instance, ask family or friends to join you in the morning-walks; this will help you stay motivated.
  4. Do a weekend workout. The weekend offers two days of opportunity.
  5. Stay active during the day. Mix exercise into your daily activities.

Call for Action

With the help of a physician or a personal trainer, choose activities that are appropriate for your fitness level and your goals. Be realistic in what you can achieve. Schedule exercise in your calendar.

Make the most of small bits of time that become available during the day. Take the stairs instead of an elevator; park your car as far as possible in the parking lot and walk into your office; take a quick walk around your office building when you need a break from work.

Take time out–do not exercise every day. Regular breaks allow for recovery and return to exercise with renewed vigour.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. “Less is More” is True. 4-Day Workweek Is Better For Everyone.
  2. How to … Incorporate Exercise into Your Daily Life
  3. The One Simple Habit Germans Swear By for a Healthier Home
  4. Work-Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”
  5. Take this Quiz and Find Out if You’re a Perfectionist

Physical Well-Being for High Performance

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In an article entitled “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in the January, 2001, issue of the Harvard Business Review, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe executives as “corporate athletes.” They explain the concept of recovering energy to bring the body, emotions, mind and spirit to a peak form and thus sustain high performance over the long haul.

Practices for Renewing Physical Energy

Physical Well-Being for High Performance The authors consider physical well-being as fundamental to the high performance state of an executive. Here is a (paraphrased) list of six healthy practices they recommend for renewing physical energy.

  1. Eat multiple small-meals a day. Eating just one or two meals a day with long periods in between may slowdown metabolism.
  2. Never skip breakfast. Eating breakfast early in the morning helps maintain metabolism during the morning.
  3. Eat a balanced diet.
  4. Reduce the consumption of sugars. Sugars represent empty calories and cause “energy-depleting spikes in blood glucose levels.”
  5. Drink at least 1.5 litres (four 12-ounce glasses) of water every day, even if you do not feel thirsty.
  6. Exercise regularly. The authors recommend “three to four 20- to 30-minute cardiovascular workouts a week, including at least two sessions of intervals—short bursts of intense exertion followed by brief recovery periods.”

Call for Action

Renewing Physical Energy In the face of ever-increasing demands to perform, deliver and excel, both at work and outside, it is easy for us to ignore our physical well-being; most of us do.

Critically examine your current lifestyle and fitness level: your eating and sleeping habits, your relaxation and entertainment choices, and, your commitment to physical and brain exercises. In consultation with people around you, viz., family, friends, bosses and physicians make the right choices to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Pick physical activities that work for you and you will enjoy. Get to and stay in the ‘Zone’.