Stress, Fatigue and the Working Environment

Abstract

A leading article in Newsweek magazine recently described stress as “the dirty little secret of the office age” (Miller, 1988). The deleterious effects of stress are both widespread and diverse, to the extent that many people would regard stress as the principal threat to human well-being in the advanced industrialized societies. A partial list of conditions which are widely considered to be stress-related is given in Table 7.1. The list includes both “symptomatic conditions” (some of which are vague) and clinical entities of a more specific nature (some of which are life-threatening). I have not attemped to differentiate between the two categories. Many of the conditions in the list have a multiple aetiology, in which stress is one contributory factor amongst many. The relative importance of stress, in any individual case, will depend upon the presence or absence of other risk factors.

Table 7.1 Stress-related Conditions

“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”

“If,” from Rewards and Fairies, by Rudyard Kipling

“… it takes all the running you can do to keep in one place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

The Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll