Lorraine Pace
A South African psychiatrist has developed a test that makes it possible, for the first time, to reliably and accurately measure a person’s level of stress. It’s quick, easy and simple – all you have to do is fill out a questionnaire that asks questions like: “Have you experienced sexual problems in the last year?”; “Do you have fewer than three caffeine-containing drinks a day (coffee, tea, cocoa, cola)?”; “Are you more irritable than usual over the past two weeks?”; and “Do you have trouble sleeping through the night?”
The stress curve, developed by Johannesburg psychiatrist Dr Jonathan Moch, is attracting international attention in psychosomatic medicine – the study of physical symptoms of psychological conditions.
Until now, says Moch, the Maslach Burnout Inventory was widely used to measure burnout or breakdown, but there was no measure of the stages leading up to burnout. The stress curve includes all the possibilities, including the “non- stressed”, but it has been validated against the Maslach Inventory.
The stress curve has an inverted-u shape – a bell curve. It works like this: a person needs to be stimulated to perform. Eventually peak performance is reached and beyond this level arousal has the effect of lowering effective performance. The zones in the curve correlate to low arousal and low performance (boredom and under stress), to peak performance (ideal) and high arousal and low performance (distress, burnout and breakdown).
The advantage of the test is that it can be applied anywhere to anyone. In business, managers can be warned that their executives are about to burn out before it actually happens.
Moch operates out of the Milpark Hospital’s newly established centre for stress reduction, which treats stress holistically, with techniques that include dietary changes such as no meat and no caffeine, sleep induction, exercise, relaxation classes and stress-hormone analysis.
Says Moch, “Although the stress curve is new and research is still being done, local blue-chip companies are keen to run the test as stress significantly affects health and a company’s bottom line. They want to pick up high-risk executives and put them on a recovery programme before the heart attack. The costs of recruiting and replacing management runs to hundreds of thousands of rand.
“Doctors estimate that between 80% to 90% of patients that they see show symptoms that are stress-related, anything from acne to headaches to asthma.”
The advantage of the stress reduction centre is that it does not carry the stigma that an admission to a psychiatric hospital would have.
Another finding related to Moch’s research is that the hormone cortisol, produced by the adrenal glands, is part of the stress response. In people who are very stressed, levels of cortisol in the body are either very high or very low. Once stress levels drop, cortisol levels normalise. Evidence suggests that high cortisol levels play a destructive role in ageing, heart attacks, strokes and diseases. Research is currently being done in South Africa to plot the correlation between cortisol and stress.