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Stress busting for accountants, part one

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18th Mar 2009
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In the first of a two-part feature, Ivor Murray of Meditations Ltd explains why accountants suffer from stress and what the effects are if not treated promptly.

The Health and Safety Executive defines stress as ‘the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them’.

Accountancy is precisely the kind of profession that provides plenty of ‘the excessive pressure’ that causes stress. Unless managed properly, this can have an extremely negative effect on your ability to work effectively, not to mention the disastrous consequences it can also have on your health and personal relationships.

Stress can make you excitable, anxious, jumpy and irritable; not exactly the ideal attributes conducive to dealing with clients. It can interfere with your ability to formulate judgments and makes you more accident prone and less able to make good decisions. In many cases, stress can cause sleeping problems, and lack of sleep (or bad quality sleep) can very quickly have a seriously negative effect on your performance and general health.

This article looks at stress in more detail and discusses practical ways to manage and reduce stress to make you a calmer, more relaxed, healthier and ultimately more effective accountant.

The physical effects of stress
When you’re under stress, a number of physiological changes take place in your body.

  • Chemicals, such as adrenaline and nor-adrenaline, are produced to fuel you for the required response.
  • Non-critical physiological responses, such as digestion, are shut down.
  • Critical responses, such as pumping oxygenated blood to the arms and legs in preparation for fight or flight, are ramped up.
  • Sweating increases in an effort to cool muscles and help them stay efficient.

In times past when humans were hunters and gatherers, it was this exact response that kept us alive. If you were trekking through the jungle and came across a tiger, you needed to decide immediately if this situation was a threat.

Once you had decided that this was indeed a threat, your body would go on ‘red alert’ and you would fight the tiger or run away: and herein lies the modern dilemma. We are still coming across those ‘tigers’ in everyday life, but the difference is that we can't choose to fight or flee anymore.

It’s easy to think that this fight or flight/adrenaline response is only triggered by obviously life-threatening danger. On the contrary, recent research shows that we experience the fight-or-flight response when simply encountering something unexpected.

The situation does not have to be dramatic; people experience this response when frustrated or interrupted, or when they experience a situation that is new or in some way challenging.

Accountancy has always provided many of these potentially stressful situations, such as uncooperative or unpleasant clients, clients who demand that you act as if they were your main or only priority, the constant update to regulations, deadlines, to name but a few.

Today’s economic climate may mean that stress is even greater for accountants. Competition among firms has increased and there is added pressure to reduce fees. At the same time, many of the expenses of running an accountancy practice have increased. The profession faces many other difficult problems and challenges, such as an increasing risk of liability and the need to keep pace with technological advances.

In stressful situations, your mind and body use the process that in past times kept you alive. However, the problem is that you can’t respond by fighting the threat or fleeing from it. Instead, you need to discover an outlet for releasing the pressure that has built up in your body. Fight or flight was a release valve for our predecessors, but today’s pressures require modern day equivalents.

In part two of Stress busting for accountants next week, Murray will look at methods of managing and relieving stress.

Ivor Murray
[email protected]
www.Meditations-UK.com

Ivor Murray is Managing Director of Meditations Ltd

View part two of Stress busting for accountants here

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