Wake up & throw up
By Catherine Fox
© Friday 8th April, 2005 - Fairfax

You may love your work but there are plenty of people who find the whole exercise literally sickening...

Heart pounding, hands sweating, stomach in knots – it’s the beginning of another day at work. For thousands of people, “wake up and throw up” is no exaggeration – it best describes the way they greet the working day. Anxiety about the job is widespread, debilitating and in many cases preventable.

Michael Stone regularly suffered from severe stomach problems when he worked as a trader with a successful Wall Street hedge fund for a few years. The pressure to get the deal done and not lose his clients’ money kept him awake at night and triggered daily stomach upsets.

“It was very exciting for the first couple of years and there was lots of adrenaline,” Stone says. “I was making good money and was loving it. But I found it hard to connect with the people there; many were into just making money and spending it.

“And there was the anxiety of being responsible for other people’s money. I had many sleepless nights when a deal was in jeopardy. We lost $US500,000 on one deal and I was so upset with myself. I felt awful. It took several months to get over that and I did get quite depressed. No one said anything to me, but I felt I’d failed.”
Fed up with the pressure and the increasing sense of futility about what he was doing, Stone left the job and tossed in his trading career.

Returning to Australia to set up his own business, he used his experience to establish a consultancy, Holistic Services, which runs workshops and advises corporates on how to help stressed-out employees. He has no shortage of potential customers.

For Tim Chilvers, the Melbourne-based general manager, corporate and business services, with Commonwealth Bank, the switch from a job managing about 20 people to one with 600 staff brought a fair amount of anxiety. Little time to spend with such a large team was a core concern when he joined about a year ago.

“When you have a team of 600 people, the most difficult thing is not knowing the people and getting a handle on who you can depend on. One of the natural inclinations when you are under stress is to shut the door and not have interruptions. What I have to do is open myself to people and share the burden.

“One of the things that frustrated me was the lack of control ... I would love to get ahead of the game and get some more of my initiatives and programs in place. Three months after I came here, my job changed and I picked up [responsibility for] South Australia and Western Australia.

“Sometimes I do catch myself closing the door and feeling less productive. So I go for a walk. In a leadership role the biggest source of anxiety is not having a large number of peers to bounce ideas off.”

Chilvers has seen many people suffering from stress and anxiety during his career in financial services. As a senior manager, he says the most obvious response is often the worse one. “As you try to relieve them of responsibility to help them cope with the stress, it can actually add to it. You put them in a mindset where their worst fears are being realised: ‘My boss has lost faith in me.’”

Nervous tension
A surprisingly large number of people exhibit the symptoms of work-related anxiety, and an increasing number are seeking treatment, according to the health professionals. But the surge is not simply a result of more hectic lifestyles and organisational expectations that employees will do more with less, although both factors contribute to the syndrome.

What nervous tension often masks is a feeling of being unable to control work and the resulting perception of job insecurity. It’s a trend that goes hand-in-hand with less predictable careers, the downsized workplace where redundancies can cut dozens of jobs out of the blue, and a business sector that views lengthy tenure with suspicion.

At the same time, employees are absorbing the impact of a shift from the traditional paternal organisational framework to a world where individual workers are urged to make it on their own and compete with their colleagues for survival every minute of every day. It’s the “up or out” era in which work status can dominate your life.

The impact on employee behaviour is gradually emerging. Psychologically, most people benefit from a moderate amount of anxiety, which is a mechanism developed by our brains in prehistoric times to help keep humans alert to danger signals in the fight for survival.

These days, worrying about our daily tasks makes many of us get them done properly and efficiently and ensures we don’t forget them. Most high-performing people often suffer from anxiety, but too much worry is detrimental, regardless of the personality.

According to an article on overcoming work anxiety by US psychologist Dr John Weaver, there are three signs of disproportionate anxiety: if the fear is out of perspective or irrational; if it results in paralysis rather than action; and if it is pervasive.

Fear that is out of proportion disrupts our ability to make logical decisions, he says, and makes us overestimate risks. When our dread rises to very high levels, the goal becomes avoidance and we can freeze during an important presentation or meeting.

Because anxiety developed in humans to elicit specific responses to dangerous situations, it should have a beginning and an end. So when stress continues, which is typically the case with serious work anxiety, it overwhelms us and causes serious health problems, often resulting in pessimism and a downward spiral into depression.

We all have a threshold for nervous tension and once we tip over that point the consequences are potentially disastrous, if not deadly, says former psychiatric nurse and therapist Natalie Wareham. Having spent years working with severely burnt-out workers, from clerks to professionals, Wareham says even the toughest executive can reach a burn-out point. Once the threshold is crossed, the damage is far more difficult to address than a preventative course of action is to institute, she argues.

“The people I have seen suffering from anxiety are from all age groups and at all stages of their careers, which is interesting. The workplace does have a responsibility for burn-out, but there is individual responsibility for it too.

“It’s actually been described to me as the feeling that at any moment someone will tap me on the shoulder and say: ‘We made a mistake and you don’t belong here.’”

Level of job insecurity
While some of this is due to personality, she says, some is not. And her work involves making people realise they can tell the boss if they are under pressure for any reason, and ask for help in managing the workload: “It’s quite amazing how they won’t do that. It’s partly because they feel they don’t have control over their own job.

“People do internalise it, and job insecurity is about not being in control. One of the major factors that distinguishes those prone to burnout is the perception of control.”

Neal Ashkanasy, an academic at the University of Queensland’s Business School, has spent years researching the effects of stress and anxiety on workplace behaviour and performance. In a study published in the Academy of Management Review in 2002 (with co-authors Peter Jordan and Charmine Hartel), Ashkanasy suggested the level of job insecurity in many organisations contributes to employee stress and its symptoms.

The insecurity is often the result of either downsizing or alterations to individual jobs when strategic changes are under way. It is reasonable to assume that it is therefore an issue in most business organisations today, he says.

Job insecurity, Ashkanasy points out, is usually defined in academic research as an internalised perception.

But the research is divided on the impact this sense can have on employee behaviour. Several recent studies have concluded that anxiety is usually a debilitating factor, while others point to results showing improved organisational performance from intermittent stress and low levels of anxiety.

Individuals, as Wareham points out, react differently to perceptions of job insecurity. Some handle it well while others find their performance deteriorates. The unremitting nature of work anxiety is often the core problem.

Decreased loyalty to the employer, rapid organisational change and the need to job hop to get ahead are all contributing to increased levels of insecurity, Ashkanasy agrees. But the competitive nature of the way we live, pinpointed by Alain de Botton in his bestseller Status Anxiety (Penguin, 2004) is also a contributor.

“The source of the anxiety is coming from the pressure we are putting on ourselves,” he says. “A lot comes from social comparisons. Someone over there is doing well and I’m not.

Making sure I am keeping up – there’s more of that because people are expected to do more with less. A few years ago, before the drive for productivity, people could feel more relaxed about not keeping up. Now there is the up or out phenomenon.”

This is something Ashkanasy has experienced first hand. “I used to work in a commerce school and the big four accountancy firms are probably the epitome of this up or out trend – and it’s just as strong today.

“In academia, it’s publish or perish. Again it’s a situation where management thinks that people can put up with this if there’s a reward, without realising people get exhausted and pressure leads to lesser performance. But then it’s up to management to provide something to counteract that.”

The fear of failure
Effective management is crucial to addressing the problems associated with anxiety, says psychologist Nigel Watts, who runs the Sydney-based consultancy, Future Platform. There’s no doubt anxiety levels have deepened in recent years and more of us are affected.

“It’s the fear of failure,” Watts says. “The impact of a bad decision these days in those important situations where there’s little room for failure is greater – it’s such a competitive environment, you only get one shot at it.

“You feel you have to stay in front of the competitors and it’s intensifying. I also think a lot of people are polarising between responsibility and non-responsibility – and as soon as you get into senior roles the performance assessment and scrutiny is intense.”
The lack of time to learn and gain experience, and to nurture a supportive network in the workplace, also contributes to the increasing number of sufferers, he adds.

Ashkanasy believes that emotional intelligence techniques can help address the problems. “A person’s emotional intelligence serves as a buffer against those stresses,” he says. “If they can’t cope they go down. People who understand what is happening can learn to cope.”

Letting anxiety become a regular ingredient of working life and refusing to tell anyone about it are the mistakes most sufferers seem to make. The experts agree that addressing the latter will help overcome the former.

How to spot the syndrome
Symptoms of work anxiety can include:

• nausea
• sexual changes
• inability to be intimate
• craving certain foods
• pain in the neck and back
• digestive problems
• irrational fears
• not managing time (the headless chicken syndrome)
• becoming snappy and short tempered
• a lack of enthusiasm.