Spotting early signs of stress
icking up on signs of stress at an early stage can be very important.”When Richard starts biting his nails it’s a sure sign something’s up” says Jane “I used to think it was a trivial thing but now I take it more seriously”.Jane now knows that it is a sign that he is becoming withdrawn, “gradually he becomes less approachable, his sleep pattern becomes disrupted and he is short with the children. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does things can get very difficult at home.”Pressure does funny things to us. It puts us on the back foot and we have to continually react to situations rather than being able to be proactive.We don’t feel that we are in control of our destiny and that can make us overly defensive and make life very uncomfortable.But there is a difference between ordinary everyday irritation at say not being able to find a parking space, or get served quickly enough at Costa Coffee, and finding yourself unable to sleep at night and resorting to destructive behaviour like biting your fingers and nails.
It can be very useful if like Jane we become quicker to read the signs, to spot clues in our behaviour that tell us something untoward is going on.
Often people notice these signs but ignore them. This is not helpful and generally the problems multiply and deepen until we are forced to look at them.
Jane has noticed that when Richard bites his nails and fingers he starts to think of himself as the victim of external events. He starts to take things very personally. Jane says “it’s like the credit crunch is all his fault.
Everything starts to feel very tight and claustrophobic at home”. For the first years in her marriage she worried that it was her fault. Jane says “it would be so difficult to get him to open up and start talking that I didn’t know what to think.
But then I noticed how bad his fingers were getting and I asked him about it.” It came as a welcome surprise when asking about this became the beginning of much more openness between them.
Since then she has become much more interested in reading the signs, not just of him, but others as well.