The message
For ever, managing work load and bearing the stress levels without emotional and physical disturbances is a challenge. There are few key factors which decide the personal scalability of a working professional to meet the increasing demands. Is it really the workload or the lifestyle we lead make things difficult? Workload is not a new challenge we are facing today and it was a challenge for our ancestors also. When compared to the kind of mental and physical stress our ancestors had undergone in those days without modern media, machineries, communication and medical facilities as we have today, we don't suffer now for such reasons. On the contrary, instead of enjoying these modern facilities, we overuse or misuse them which lead to increased stress levels.
For example, we over communicate in these days, spend our time more than required in many aspects which reduces our bandwidth and in turn increases our stress level. We over use all kind of machineries and show a long face to walk through a short distance, which leads to health complications. We also misuse/overuse medicines and chemicals and run in to serious issues instead of improving our health by proper usage of chemicals. Due to our ignorance we don't even notice the warnings given by our body in advance about any malfunctions in our system.
This reflects very clearly the lifestyle we follow is acting negatively rather than the workload. Though the modern facilities have increased our bandwidth, we tend to consume them for non-productive activities and increase our own stress level.
Having served manufacturing industry and software industry together for about 30 years, I could identify the important factors which are helping us to remain mentally and physically healthy. After taking software development as my core job, I realized the need for the physical workouts. I started learning yoga from different Guru's for about 5 years. After that I continued practicing till now and giving solutions to people for specific problems. When I also learned Acu-pressure therapies from a professional, I started analyzing the core factors which are common to Yoga and Acu pressure points. With this knowledge I am able to follow few simple ways to overcome the health risks that we have in this competitive environment.
Physical and Mental health:
Physically staying fit and healthy is an art. We need to be conscious about all our movements and postures we follow frequently. There are so many articles around sitting postures in front of a computer and in workstation. Obviously the sitting posture decides the spine column strains and overall health for all white collar workers. Currently we get in to major issues like acidity, hyper tension, fatty lever, higher cholesterol and sugar levels etc probably due to our restricted sitting postures with compressed stomach. There is no single sitting posture which will give us comfort for a longer duration. Every 30 minutes we may need to change the posture to enable even blood circulation through various parts of the body. On the contrary, when we correlate this with the condition of Yogis, they used to sit in one place for months together and chant manthras and remained very healthy in spite of staying static. Interestingly the reason is, they had different postures in the form of Asanas (static postures). Asanas were designed in such a way to acquire the effects of body movements while we remain in one place. Carefully studying and customizing these Asanas will definitely help us to overcome many postural issues we face today. If we do Asanas in general and workout without any specific intentions, they also produce only generic result.
But the current problem we are facing today is very specific in nature i.e. restricted sitting posture with a lot of mental pressure without breaks in between. When we take a closer look at the work content today, they are not really complicated when we are equipped with so many facilities around us. It is only a myth developed over a period that the white collar jobs are very stressful. In reality, it is not so and we make things complicated without understanding the ways to remain healthy. We just need to have a complete self review of our own life style with a professional's help and make a few conscious changes which would help us in resolving the issues today.
Mental health is something we need to take care by managing our emotions. The scalability of a person is very much dependent on the mental health. Even in the professional environment, we can hardly see people with bigger responsibilities remain calm and smiley. One has to understand his own capability and try to coach the mind to achieve better scalability. Majority of younger generation started believing today that the best way to relax is to go for outing, consume alcohol, fast food and dance without much control over what we do. It is definitely a temporal relaxation which will leave a residual tension in the body the next day. I am also discussing on the daily lifecycle of people later in this paper which can be correlated with this point. Typical relaxation exercises like Yoga, Meditation, Yoga-Nithra, Dhyanam etc would definitely help a person to remain physically healthy while taking good amount of load in the professional front to scale up well. Without understanding and preparing our mind to take up such loads, endeavoring going too ambitious might lead to health disorders at one stage in the long run and it may not be immediate.
Our brain may have lot of memory capacity by nature but the processing power comes from the healthy habits one follows. Obviously this varies according to the nature of the person. Stretching beyond the acceptable limits to meet our professional commitments might lead to burn-outs in a very short span. These kinds of situations snub the alertness and creativity of a person which potentially leads to a lot of rework in the job which increases the workload again. If a job cannot be done in the first attempt, then it indicates that the person involved is not having clear thoughts about it. Both in personal and professional life, only people with good mental stability can achieve a stable growth. Those who are not stable may not accomplish things consistently. Due to the above reasons many people get triggered by a crisis or rather they can only perform when and where there is a crisis. Rest of the time their energy levels remain static. They lack the prevention attitude because crisis management gets the recognition most of the time. This kind of impulsive attitude triggers all kind of system malfunction in our body to do an extra work. Thus the mental health affects the physical properties which in turn lead to sickness. We can easily overcome this situation by consciously taking some disciplinary measures with right professional acumen.
About Author / Additional Info:
I am software professional with 30 years of experience in various domains.
www.sureshsri.in
