In the chair: Stress is not an illness, it's a symptom

Jun 18 2009 With Toby Ingham, Buckinghamshire Advertiser

STRESS can do funny things to you. One moment you feel you are the luckiest man in town, successful, earning a good salary and your wife and children are happy at home.

Frequent holidays, children at good schools, your plans for the future look sturdy. You have a pension plan and hope to retire early and improve your golf.

Suddenly everything changes. It is not your fault by any means, but a string of interconnecting global business events occurs and suddenly you lose a major client account and everything starts to unwind.

What you took for granted evaporates and it affects you. You had become used to success, you had started to think the difficult times were behind you. Now you start to notice you are not sleeping so well, you are more irritable, quicker to lose your temper, your back aches, you lose much of your vitality.

Hardest of all is the pressure of keeping up a front of success with neighbours and friends, when you know everything is sliding in reverse.

What to do? Bury your head in the sand? Ignore it? Keep going through the motions like you always do? Try to distract yourself from the feelings of failure and shame? Ask for medication or develop new talents for positive thinking? What good can come of being miserable, you ask?

Well, funny thing is, facing painful situations can actually be much better for you than deluding yourself or developing destructive habits like drinking too much.

Suffering the slings and arrows of a major business downturn and the emotional and economic pressure head on is better for you. Why? Because it puts you more in touch with your situation, and facing up to difficulty develops your ability to handle difficult things.

Not just the difficulty of tough business deals, but the difficulty that comes with the downturn.

The family and marital pressure, the crisis of self-esteem, the shame, failure, stress, and the raft of psychosomatic symptoms that emerge for you to plague your GP with.

Facing things, trying to see more clearly gives you the chance to adapt and evolve into something new.

Of course, it is difficult and involves opening yourself up to greater levels of uncertainty and fear, but stress in itself is not an illness, it is a symptom.

It means something within you requires your attention, something needs to change.

And far from being the bane of your life, it may be the signal for the beginning of a new set of changes and a whole new cycle of life.

Toby Ingham Psychotherapist and counsellor, 01494 671 121 www.counsellingbuckinghamshire.co.uk