Industry and commerce would crumble were there not people at the top who were addicted to stress. They have type A personalities and are goal-orientated, single-minded, impatient, sexually dominant, ambitious and even ruthless. They are not only obsessed by their work but are capable of concentrating on its many aspects at the same time.
To have a type A personality, but with a controlling boss, is medically potentially dangerous for someone with these characteristics. Once the type A high-flyer becomes the chief, some of the ill effects of the adrenalin-based tension are removed, and there is hope for his coronaries and the heart muscle they supply. Even an adrenalin-addicted type A person is at increased risk of cardiovascular disease. There are less extreme and more lawful ways to ease stress than by pushing the boss under the nearest bus. Those who had hoped that they could look as cool as David Cameron by abandoning their tie, or watching films at the Notting Hill cinema, can compromise by visiting an art gallery.
Last Friday it was reported that there is apparently a link between the metabolic syndrome and the amount of work-based stress that someone suffers. This is another good reason to search out the right boss and suitable job as well as to find a way of relaxing from the strains of tolerating both.
There is a genetic component to the metabolic syndrome, but its underlying cause is an increased resistance of the tissue cells to insulin. As the result of the increasing resistance the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas need to secrete ever increasing quantities of insulin. Finally the pancreas can produce no more, or may begin to fail; either way there is a relative or absolute insulin lack, leading to type 2 diabetes with its risk of stroke, heart attacks and blindness. The metabolic syndrome is also associated with raised blood cholesterol, central obesity, raised blood pressure and polycystic ovaries.
These symptoms should be worrying enough to encourage people to lose weight, take more exercise, stop smoking and try to enjoy vegetables. Now they will have the incentive to reduce office stress as well.
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It has long been accepted that the secret of unwinding and relaxation for a type A personality is to find something to do by themselves — or with a non-demanding friend — that they will enjoy and that will distract their overactive minds from thoughts of spreadsheets or tomorrow’s copy.
The good news is that ambitious workers don’t have to adopt yoga, meditation or even, like Sir Alec Douglas-Home, take up needlework, or, like Sir Winston Churchill, bricklaying. It seems that the obsessive, driven high-flyer needs to visit an art gallery or an art fair to achieve the advantages of relaxation.
Professor Angela Clow, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Westminster, has studied changes in the City high-flyer’s hormone stress levels and the physical and emotional effects of a 40-minute visit to the Guildhall Art Gallery. This has works ranging from Constables to the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian genre painters.
Professor Clow measured the cortisol levels in the saliva of the high-flyers when they first visited the gallery, and again after they had spent 40 minutes immersed in Constable or Sidney Cooper. Whereas it would normally take five hours for the cortisol levels in someone’s saliva to drop by 32 per cent, the same effect was achieved after only 40 minutes in the gallery. Research indicates that a reduction in 32 per cent of the saliva cortisol level equates to a 45 per cent reduction in someone’s perceived stress level.
Last week two colleagues encouraged me to be a guinea pig to test this theory. When suitably stressed by my Tuesday regime, the heaviest day of the week, we visited the London Art Fair. As predicted by Professor Clow, before my 40 minutes were up I’d forgotten the unpaid bills and unwritten letters as I was able to escape to a different world where I could fantasise about buying a Paolozzi sculpture or a Freud etching. Nobody was around to test my saliva cortisol level but it is a safe bet that it was appreciably lower than during the afternoon and I could attend my evening engagement feeling reasonably relaxed.