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Don’t let stress “stress” you out

Posted on | December 7, 2011 | 486 views | Comments Off

By Julia Harris

Robert Meier knows a thing or two about stress. As director of Ohio State’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP), he sees scores of people who are struggling with stress — the real, physiological symptoms of stress — and that number is only going up. It’s not surprising when you think about the times in which we live: Economic upheaval; outbreaks of disease; hurricanes and tsunamis and other natural disasters; political firestorms and military conflict.

“We are really in a period of time when stress is coming at us so fast, we’re not physiologically equipped to deal with it,” Meier said. “We have to help people recognize that stress is not some imaginary thing: It’s real, and it hits home.”

And it hits home especially hard right around the holidays, Meier noted, when people are busy running around making, doing, buying — in gray, wet Ohio weather that can depress even the most sunny of dispositions. People tend to neglect their health, ignore their symptoms of distress, so that when January hits and the long stretch of winter settles in and all the stressors catch up with them, suddenly life is overwhelming.

That’s where Meier and his staff at the EAP, a service for benefits-eligible faculty, staff and dependents, can help. “What we try to do is help people understand the physiological effects of stress inside a human body,” he said. “It affects all the organ systems, including the brain, so that our higher functions — the ability to remember, focus, think clearly — start to erode and you start living on emotions and instincts.”

Other symptoms of out-of-control stress are chronic sleeplessness and changes in appetite. “If you don’t manage your stress, your stress manages you,” Meier said. “We provide techniques to help mitigate those physical effects, like meditation, deep breathing and relaxation, guided imagery.

Part of Your Plan for Health, the EAP offers five complimentary face-to-face or phone counseling sessions per plan year, either with one of the three internal counselors or an external provider. In addition, EAP recently partnered with IMPACT Solutions — an Ohio-based behavioral healthcare consulting firm — to expand its statewide network of licensed professionals who are immediately accessible, all day, every day.

“Two of our selling points are confidentiality and the promptness with which we can get people in,” Meier said. “If you have a crisis, you don’t need an appointment three weeks from tomorrow. You can’t plan six weeks ahead for things to go wrong.”

That was a major draw for Dave Donley, scholarship program manager for the College of Engineering, who says he was impressed and grateful that Meier was able to schedule a session the very day Donley called. “I called at 10, he called me back at 11:30 and I saw him at around 4 that day,” he recalled.

Donley, who sought assistance because of a long bout with depression, says he began to feel better from the very first meeting with Meier. He learned about some coping mechanisms that might work — such as taking vitamins, using a reduced dose of a sleeping medication to help him get more than three hours of sleep per night and choosing which forms of exercise would be best for helping him manage his stress.

“Tennis is good because you have to work really hard at focusing and you don’t have time to sit and ruminate,” Donley said. “That made a lot of sense.”

“One of the things that really impressed me was his scientific approach to dealing with stress issues,” Donley added. “My dad was a scientist, and I was taught if you don’t have data and can’t quantify it, you just better keep quiet.”

Donley hopes that by talking about his own experience with EAP, the Ohio State community will become more aware of the services that are available to them and also overcome any sense of stigma they may feel about seeking help.

“I think most people nowadays have either been in therapy or should be,” he said with a laugh. “I just know that within two weeks, my wife was telling me how much better I looked, and I was getting seven or eight hours of sleep a night. I’m still not ‘normal’ — but who is?”

Did you know…

To learn more about all the services provided by the Employee Assistance Program, see their expanded website at osuhealthplan.com/OhioStateEAP.

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