• Work/employment responsibilities--Every member of the family is affected by the stressors related to the job of each family member. Such stressors include employment and unemployment; pay, training, and promotion; work conditions and challenge; living conditions and relocations; commitment to work and to family; conflict between competing careers; and preparation for retirement and/or changing market demands. These stressors are bound up with those that follow.
  
• Financial responsibilities--contributing to the welfare and well-being of the entire family unit. Money offers more stress-related obstacles than almost anything else. As a single person, you may seem to make financial decisions mostly for yourself; while sometimes stressful, that is still an accountability ratio of 1:1. In a family, decisions and the decision-making process over making money, spending money, and saving money involves spouses, children, and sometimes parents as well.
  
• Raising children--the awesome task of being a parent. Stress can come from all of the worry, desire, disappointment, and excitement you have for your children (and all of that usually comes in one day!). It is the greatest social responsibility we have, and can also feel like the most difficult. We not only have a responsibility to care for our kids, we also have to impart our sense of responsibility and values onto them as well, whether they like it or not! As you likely don’t need to be told, opportunities for mismanaged stress here lurk everywhere!
  
• Relationships--Family is not just obligation, of course, it’s also love and relationship--in fact that usually started it all! Maintaining and growing relationships with a spouse, with parents, siblings and in-laws can be a stressor for the same reasons as any interpersonal relationship: you can be dealing with issues of conflict, decision-making, communication, commitment, broken promises, and trust.

Reflection: This is a good time to record your own thoughts about family—its source of great satisfaction and cause of stress and anxiety.

• Of the Future: A positive vision of your future may nurture hope, expectation, and challenging efforts in your life experience; that’s good stress. Worry over the future can be an immense stressor. Whether grounded in a valid basis for concern, or a general anxiety about the future, this stress is real and can cause problems. Areas where your vision of the future can cause distress:
  • decision-making anxiety leads to delayed or failed life decisions
  • fear of failure so strong that you simply don’t try
  • worry that your present success can’t or won’t continue
  • general anxiety over future world conditions or of the unknown
  • fear of future medical problems/complications/relapses
  • fear of future financial problems--debt/stock market decline/loss of income/retirement.
  Vision of the future can be a stressor anytime we feel ill-equipped to deal with what is to come--whether it’s certain or uncertain, positive or negative.
  
• Of the Past: Reflection of the past can encourage thanksgiving for your blessings and opportunities and humble repentance for your wrongs and failures. Or, obsessive worry over your past can be stressors causing guilt, remorse, shame or loss lingering in your rear-view mirror. Chronic stress over the past can lead to serious depression and can have serious negative impact on your physical and emotional health. Common past haunting that can become stressors include:
• loss of job, that never should have happened, or that changed your whole life
• loss of loved one, relived every day over a long period of time coloring your life with others
• end of relationship/marriage caused by a pattern of mistakes that have long since been acted on
• regretted decision of any kind, causing interpersonal, vocational, or financial ill effects
• wrong done to another, damaging permanent trusting relationships
• physical or emotional traumatic experiences that settle from your past to your present.

When the past is a constant laboratory for learning lessons and self-understanding and improvement, it can be a positive arena of thought. But when we dwell on negatives from the past, like feeding a monster, negative stress responses are sure to come. Don’t underestimate the impact your MIND can have on your BODY!

Reflection: Make a short list of your own future or past stressors. What are they and what are you doing about them? Do the mistakes of your yesterdays get addressed and laid to rest, or do they become a backyard compost helping stress grow toward depression or low self-esteem?

• Lifestyle in the 21st century is a major cause for stress for every person; frustration is often our response of choice, but not the healthiest. Modern-age stressors causing frustration include changing technology, expanding information, denied entitlement rights, global complexities right next door, and speed (fast-paced life)! For better or for worse, we have become accustomed, but not necessarily adjusted, to today’s fast-paced society. The most wasteful stress responses, and unfortunately the most common, we experience today are really a result of modern-day advances. Why experience exhausting frustration over things generally not in our control? Things like:
  • waiting in lines or for delayed appointments
  • sitting in traffic, especially now that fuel is so costly
  • on hold--busy telephone signals
  • our crashing, confusing computers!
  • service at stores, restaurants.
  Any time our immediate desires are delayed--or we perceive them to be--frustration can become a stressor that leads to anger and even, at worst, rage. This damaging stressor is really a function of our ability to accomplish so many things today in such a short period of time; so, frustration cycles can be not just daily but hourly phenomena if we fail to manage them.

“Life is hard no matter how old you are.”--Rosalinda, age 13, from a Youth Calendar

• Compounded Routine: Anxiety and stress are not limited to individual challenges, events or circumstances. Overload becomes a stressor when perfectly manageable tasks or obligations are compounded one on top of another! Something as simple as answering phone calls, routinely accomplished with no stress, can turn into a negative stressor when six calls are received in five minutes, or three people are on hold. Overload is one of the premier stressors in overachievers who overextend. However, those leaders with a clear grasp on their limitations are sometimes more able to keep down the number of balls in the air at one time.
  
  College students who insist on cramming their schedules with more credit hours than is recommended, parents who have to work overtime or more than one job to make ends meet, those in occupations that require wearing many hats at once—all are prime targets of the negative stress responses associated with overload.
  
• Responsibility Overload: The common danger is not that the responsibilities are by themselves more than the person can handle; it is the requirement to be constantly “on”--at work and at home. Daniel Girdano’s thorough work, Controlling Stress and Tension, picks up on this theme of stimulation by defining overload as: “a level of stimulation or demand that exceeds the capacity to process or comply with that input; over-stimulation” (p. 80). That text goes on to describe the overload effects of one of the most stressful known occupations--air-traffic controllers (ATCs):

ATCs are faced with a combination of excessive time pressures, life-and-death responsibility, often insufficient support (either managerial or technical), and a virtually damning expectation for perfection from themselves and others. Research on these workers clearly demonstrates the stressful outcome of task overload . . . . Research has revealed that ATCs are occupationally predisposed to certain stress-related diseases, the most significant of which is hypertension, followed by peptic ulcers, and finally diabetes. The most highly stressful jobs of ATCs must certainly help explain why 32.5 percent of those examined in one study suffered from either gastric or duodenal ulcers (Girdano, p. 81).

• Over-Stimulation: Most of us are rarely required to perform such intensive tasks, requiring such constant focused attention, with such high stakes, as an air-traffic controller. But the message and pattern are clear. The constant rain of stimulation will eventually put you under water up to your neck, and beyond. And the overload danger of the minister who must monitor the workings of the church, visit and comfort every ailing or troubled member, and maintain a 24-hour, 7-day on-call status, as well as attend his own family/relationship needs, and in the case of the bivocational/small church minister, take on another job, should be taken very seriously.

Reflection: Do you try--or are you required--to do too many things at once or in rapid succession without a break?

• Personality:
• Change:
• Expectations:
• Family:
• Vision of the Future/Past:
• Frustration:
• Overload:
• Other stressors:

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© 2009 servantleaderstoday.com; hosted and copyrighted by Lloyd Elder & Associates, Inc.
For full citation of referenced works, see Bibliography/Links at www.servantleaderstoday.com
Adapted by Lloyd Elder, Th.D., Founding Director, Moench Center for Church Leadership