by Wendy Sullivan and Marian Way

Have you ever felt you were behaving like a headless chicken, or as though you were under a big black cloud; have you suffered from jangling nerves or painful tension in your neck and shoulders?

If you are one of the estimated five million people in this country who suffer from work-related stress, it’s likely that you can relate to one of these symptoms, or if not, you can list one or, more likely, several of your own. If you work as a therapist or counsellor, you’ll be very familiar with the signs of stress.

We all know that a healthy diet, enough sleep and regular exercise are great ways to minimise stress – but when there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it, the prospect of finding the time to eat well, to relax, and to exercise only adds to the pressure we’re under. This is true of other physical symptoms too, where we fail to do what we know would help. And so the symptoms just carry on – or get worse….

Given that people often don’t act on what they cognitively know would be good for them, we decided to approach the subject from a different and very powerful angle, harnessing the way we are hard-wired to think – i.e. by making use of metaphor.

Jangling Coins

One of Marian’s stress symptoms was jangling nerves… “I would wake up the day after a long work-day and it was as though there were coins at the end of every nerve in my body, banging up against my skin and banging into each other and jangling loudly, leaving me without the energy I needed to function properly that day.” The exploration of this metaphor resulted in its transformation from jangling coins within the body, into a visualisation – outside the body - of the word ‘JANGLING’ made of the same coins. This picture now comes to mind whenever Marian is working at a fast, overactive pace, using up energy at a time of day when she should be slowing down. “Now ‘jangling coins’ have a useful function – they remind me that it’s time to stop work, so I can have energy for more than one day at a time.”

A Mat of Hooks

Wendy’s described her symptom as… “Like having a mat of hooks across my back, all interlinked, and so difficult to undo.” They shrunk that area of her back, which pulled on the area around them, puckering it and hurting. In her exploration, she realised that the hooks wanted to rest - and with this realisation, she found herself no longer sitting in her chair, but lying down, resting! 

We’d begun our explorations with one person asking the other, “Your stress symptom is like what?” before turning our attention to what the desired outcome might be.

We noticed some similarities between our metaphors: both transformed into an early warning system that allows us to notice / act on stress before it results in the symptoms that we identified, and both our metaphors involved metal. While this is certainly not universal, it is interesting given the original use of the word ‘stress’ related to an external force that produced an effect in metal, either distorting it or putting a strain on it. 

Some more typical definitions of stress these days might be:

‘Anything that makes you tense, angry, frustrated or unhappy.’
- Wilkinson, G., ‘Understanding Stress’

‘Stress level = potentially stressful events + response to the event(s) + significance of the events to us’
- Wilkinson, G., ‘Understanding Stress’

‘Stress occurs when pressure exceeds your perceived ability to cope.’
- Cooper, C. & Palmer S., ‘Conquer your Stress’

Research commissioned by the Health and Safety Executive indicates that:

• Stress is reportedly the second most common form of work-related ill-health conditions (after musculoskelatal disorders).
• Nearly 1 in 5 of all working individuals think their job is very or extremely stressful.
• 12.8 million working days a year are lost to stress
• In 2003-04, nearly two thirds of a million people reported work stress at a level that was making them ill.

These findings seem to be reflected in our experience when we’ve asked groups of people if they have experienced stress in the last week. Typically at least half, and often far more, say that they have.

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