How’s Your Stress?

Several times a year, a new “fashion season” begins. And each year, there is a “new black” — a color as ubiquitous as black and just as “cool.” Back in 1987, when I was in junior high, it was sea green. In later years, it has been gray, pink, or even white. I think that last year, black was the “new black.”

Like fashion trends, each season brings a new trend in healthcare. In recent years, patient safety has been the focus. In the past twelve months, the growing nursing shortage made headlines. And in 2006, the “new black” appears to be stress.

That’s right — how do you keep work-related stress from causing a nervous breakdown? The news recently has featured several stories about what employers are doing to keep their staff stress levels down.

Corporate gyms are all the rage — making exercise easy and locating it nearby makes employees healthier and reduces stress. Some companies bring in professional masseuses to give foot rubs and back rubs to aching employees. Others give away prizes to a local spa.

Doris Young, RN, PhD, has been a nurse for more than thirty years and has now written a book on nurse burnout. Nurse burnout and turnover account for one in five of the country’s 2 million nurses who change jobs or quit the profession outright. And all this is part of a larger problem in which work-related stress is contributing to a $26 billion challenge for U.S. healthcare facilities.

Young’s book teaches nurses how to deal with stress and also teaches nurse managers to be coaches to help their staff members. The book, Save the First Dance for You — The Nurse’s Guide to Serving Your Profession, Patients, and Yourself, One Step at a Time will be published this fall, and includes several practical and coping techniques for nurses.

Not only that, but now products from the “natural foods” sector may help. A research study published online ahead of print from the journal Gut indicated that probiotics may help to reduce gut symptoms caused by long-term stress. You can read more about this study on page 8.

The researchers based their findings on analysis of gut tissue taken from rats subjected to two different kinds of stress, one of which mimics psychological stress that produces the type of effects that would be seen in the human gut. Stress made the guts of the rats “leaky” and boosted the ability of bacteria to adhere to the cell lining. But probiotic treatment decreased the lining’s stickiness.

Chronic stress is known to be implicated in the development of irritable bowel syndrome, in the worsening of symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, and sensitizes the gut. It affects all area of the body, not just the digestive system, so eradicating stress, or at least teaching nurses how to deal with it more effectively, has the potential to increase the nurse’s overall health and sense of well-being.

So how is your stress? You can take a quick online quiz to determine where your stress levels place you — with “few hassles,” with “pretty good control,” in the “danger zone,” or “stressed out.” Visit www.lessons4living.com/stress_test.htm to take the quiz. The site is run by Dan Johnston, a clinical psychologist who has spent 25 years providing counseling and stimulating others to learn “lessons for living.”

This issue of EndoNurse has plenty of information to help reduce your stress, including an article on how to interact with geriatric patients — reducing stress for both them and you.

So sit back, relax, prop up your feet, and enjoy a stress-relieving issue of EndoNurse.

Here’s to tranquil living, until next time,

Kathy Dix
Managing Editor

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