The Last Taboo

It's not sex. It's not drinking. It's stress--and it's soaring.

(Continued, page 2)

"Typically the people who come to me think that their problem is unique. It's not," says Dr. John Arden, a stress therapist in San Francisco and author of Surviving Job Stress. But stress does manifest itself differently with everyone. For one CEO, says a doctor who treated him, stress causes the right side of his body to turn "numb and tingling" whenever his car pulls into the company parking lot. For the president of a financial services firm, each new wave of corporate scandals prompts obsessing about the worst possible outcome of his every decision. Will that expenditure come back to haunt me? Is my staff honest? Should I send this e-mail? Then there are those senior executives suffering from bladder control problems (really)--and even more who have lost their sex drive completely (yes, stress can do that). There is no medical definition of stress, but it is directly linked to cardiovascular disease, depression, impaired immune disorders, alcoholism, drug addiction--plus the everyday headaches, back spasms, overeating, and other annoying ailments your body has developed in response. "Don't let anyone tell you it is just in your head; it is in your body too," says Quick.

Consider the case of Naomi Henderson, who was paralyzed by her stress--literally. The 58-year-old CEO of RIVA, a small market-research firm in Bethesda, Md., often put in 120 hours a week at the office and slept two hours a night. A perfectionist who was unable to delegate, she couldn't turn down any request for her time and so was doing, well, everything. And she hadn't taken a vacation in years. "I felt like a bowl of chocolate mousse, and everyone had a spoon but me," she says.

After keeping this pace for several weeks straight, one night Henderson woke up to go to the bathroom and couldn't move her legs. She stared down at her limp limbs, blinking in disbelief. Her mind began fixating on the most improbable of causes: Polio? Some new disease she hadn't heard of yet? In a panic, she screamed for her husband. He scooped her up and drove her to the hospital, carrying her--still in a bathrobe and with tears streaming down her face--into the emergency room. The diagnosis: stress. The doctor put her on bed rest 14 hours a day for six weeks.

Though traumatic, the incident did not get the competitive executive to change her ways. A few years later, shortly after she learned that her partner was leaving the business, it happened again: the temporary paralysis, the ER, the bed rest. What did eventually push Henderson to seek help was her ballooning weight. The doctor told her that stress (specifically, the binge eating she was using to cope with it) was again the cause of her problems. At first, "I was pissed off," she says. "I didn't want to hear about stress; it is not going to go away. Isn't there a salad thing that can solve my problem?"

But under the care of Dr. Pamela Peeke, who treats a number of FORTUNE 500 executives, Henderson got better. She did it by fundamentally reorganizing how she lives her life. "It's mental aerobics," says Peeke, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland. "Top athletes do stuff like this for their bodies; the highest execs need to do it for their minds."

Henderson now has a timer on her watch that beeps on the hour to remind her to stop whatever she is doing and take a break for stretches and deep breathing. She forces herself to take short naps to replenish her energy during the day, particularly on airplanes, where she has banned work so she can doze. She has mastered the art of the polite no: "Thanks so much for asking, but I won't be able to meet that request." And hanging over her desk is a prescription written by Dr. Peeke: "Must have ten-day vacation 3x a year." Henderson, who required weekly sessions (at $150 an hour) with Peeke for two years, now sees the stress doc quarterly. Says Henderson: "I'm clear that I'm never going to be in a stress-free mode. The business of business is about stress. But I will become the master of stress management."

How can you tell if your stress--or that of someone who works for you--is getting out of control? Telltale signs include irritability, forgetfulness, social isolation, and sudden changes in appearance, such as disheveled clothing and weight gain. Under great stress, everyone's dominant trait becomes even more pronounced. So if you're detail-oriented, you become a micromanager; if you're a private person, you withdraw from your colleagues; if you're upbeat and outgoing, you become hyperactive. Which means that stress won't help you win any Manager of the Year awards.

Not all stress is bad, experts say. Some people thrive under stressful conditions. In corporate America, especially, people often rise to the top by learning how to overcome stress. It is when stress overwhelms you that it becomes a problem. And that breaking point is different for each of us. "Stress is like a violin string," says Dr. Allen Elkin of the Stress Management and Counseling Center, a clinic in New York City. "If there's no tension, there's no music. But if the string is too tight, it will break. You want to find the right level of tension for you--the level that lets you make harmony in your life."

That means stress management. It virtually didn't exist a decade ago; now it's a $10 billion industry. It might involve anything from breathing techniques to psychotherapy--even stints at in-patient clinics like the one PeaceHealth exec Haughom attended. And it just might be a lifelong process. Almost two years after the mountains became immovable for Haughom, he says he still has to make a conscious effort to keep his stress under control. "The situation hasn't changed," he says. "But I have changed."

During meetings at work, Haughom now brings up issues the moment they start to bother him rather than internalizing them. After particularly intense meetings, he makes sure to take a couple of deep breaths to calm himself before moving on to the day's next order of business. When he comes home at 7 p.m., his wife no longer immediately asks why he's so tense. He isn't. Gone, too, are the early-morning e-mail marathons. Instead he has been focusing more on family, enjoying, he says, the best relationship he has had in years with his four sons, ages 18 to 24. At night there's no more tossing and turning: "I sleep like I did when I was 12 years old."

Haughom's stint away from the office to deal with stress hasn't hurt his career either, insists PeaceHealth CEO Haywood--though Haywood admits that since his company is in the health-care industry, he may be more understanding than, say, his peers on Wall Street. "We don't dwell on it," says Haywood, who encouraged Haughom to take the time he needed. "Part of it is the guilt, because you wonder how much the job is contributing to the problem. But he is doing better now than ever." Last month, Haughom was named one of the nation's top ten health-care IT innovators by a prestigious panel of national health-care leaders.

Favoring recovery lingo, Haughom proudly admits to "taking things day by day." Can it be that simple? Yes.

PAGES 1 | 2