HEALTH EXECUTIVE STRESS

IT HAPPENED one year ago. Bob Brown’s new yellow Seville did not leave the driveway at 7 a.m. on Monday as usual. It remained conspicuously parked all day in front of his rambling North Dallas home. Bob, age 39, did not go to work that morning. In fact, he decided not to go back at all.

For the past four years he had been the hard-driving chief financial officer of one of the fastest growing banks in the Dallas area. His responsibilities included managing a large staff and nearly $100 million in assets. Lately he had been drinking an increasing amount of Jack Daniels on the rocks, taking longer lunch hours, blowing up at his employees, shifting key decisions to subordinates, and daydreaming. On Friday he quit to save the embarrassment of being fired. On Saturday, with his life already in shambles, his wife walked out.

“I don’t care about anything. I just want to be left alone,” Bob says on the first anniversary of that painful Monday. “I don’t want anyone to expect anything of me any more.” Now Bob putters at remodeling old houses, a task which scarcely fills the day. After the divorce he and his two teenage sons moved to a small clapboard house in the suburbs which Bob originally bought as rental property. His wife got the Seville, and he bought a 1969 Olds.

He has gained eight pounds, and his most avid current interest is watching television. The chances are one in five that he will die of a heart attack before he reaches his 50th birthday.

Bob has failed to survive in a difficult executive environment. He is mentally and physically worn out with corporate life specifically, and with his own life in general. As the victim of severe stress, his life is out of control.

What’s more, the effects of Bob’s problems do not stop at his personal loss. The local business community is now minus another of its brightest and most productive minds, and the banking profession is but one area in which the phenomenon is occurring. A respected Dallas research psychologist quit his job to open a toy store in San Antonio. A management consultant, in a documented case which reads like a fictional Walter Mitty, left a goodbye note for his wife of 23 years and sailed away to the Bahamas on a boat that he secretly bought and has been paying on for five years.

No one knows just how many executives voluntarily abandon their professions and families today because they can no longer cope, nor how many more simply suffer in quiet desperation. But the impact of stress upon the nation’s work productivity is becoming more and more evident. Last year for the first time in American history, the gross national product (with inflation factored out) registered a negative 2 1/2 per cent.

Much of the productivity loss is due to economic factors, but some of it may be due to human stress. A growing number of companies – Xerox, Steak and Ale, and National Chemsearch Corporation (now NCH Corporation) among them – consider the problem of stress in today’s work world major enough to institute a variety of programs to combat it. The organized strategies range in nature from aerobic exercise to Bible study to noontime piano concerts to 24-hour telephone hot lines for employees with psychological problems.

Robert W. Phelps, regional vice president of Human Resources Inc., which operates such a hot line employee assistance program for 11 of the nation’s largest corporations, explains, “Companies aren’t instituting these programs merely for altruistic reasons. As work stress continues to increase, it makes good financial sense for corporations to become concerned about the impact of stress upon human productivity.” Most of the existing company stress programs are designed for all employees, because stress can strike anyone at any level of work. But some top managers admit that major life problems seem greater at the executive level than at any other.

“When an executive can’t cope, the loss of productivity is disproportionately felt within the company,” notes a former top Time/Life executive. “And the effects of stress among executives ripple downward through the entire corporate structure.”

Phelps, for example, says that while 4-7 per cent of the total U.S. population are diagnosed alcoholics, he suspects the percentage of alcoholism at the executive level to be twice that. Phelps, the retired vice president of E.F. Hutton Co., is himself a recovered alcoholic who has survived three heart attacks.

Dr. William W. Entzminger, a Dallas psychotherapist and family counselor, explains that 20 years ago a patient with symptoms of executive burnout might have been diagnosed as psychosomatic.

“Stress is another word for behavior which we have long recognized,” Entz-minger explains. “It happens when the mind attempts to convert repeated doses of psychic energy into the physical ’fight or flight’ manifestation. Stress is the result of the thought process itself, not of what happens to you in the exterior environment. And one chief internal stressor is fear. If a person is professionally fearful of failure or condemnation, his job may become his enemy. His fun will be converted to anxiety. The goal of psychother-apeutic treatment is to help the patient identify and prioritize his fears. In so doing he disarms the fears of their negative power and replaces destructive behavior with constructive behavior.”

“Modern man is besieged by more unrelenting pressures and rapid-fire stimulation than at any time in history,” writes Hans Selye, M.D., in his book, Executive Health. “The result is not only the celebrated forms of neurosis and alienation that social scientists have chronicled, but numerous crippling diseases spurned by an overload on the body’s adaptive mechanisms.”

However, Dr. Edward J. Rydman, a Dallas psychotherapist who specializes in family counseling contends, “Stress was just as intensely felt by individuals in American society 50 years ago as it is today. The nature of our problems has changed, but people have not.”

“As major metropolitan cities grow, tension levels increase as a result of crowding, noise, and business complexities,” Rydman observes. “But pressure is an inside job – inside of ourselves. It is imposed not by the environment, but by the goals, attitudes, and values we choose for ourselves. Husbands and wives living in the serene mountains of New Mexico divorce just as frequently and vehemently as do husbands and wives in Dallas. The pressures are merely different,” he points out.

“Everything in life has its trade-off,” Rydman continues. “The very decision to move to a crowded city is a self-made one. If you choose to live in Richardson and work downtown, the price you pay is having to fight the traffic on Central Expressway.”

The antidote for stress, Rydman believes, is the ability to pace oneself. “The heart beats part of the time and rests part of the time. The human mind needs both contact and withdrawal from its environment. One must punch at his problems, back off for a time, and then punch again. The crowding of our cities makes it more difficult to get the physical space we need for constructive withdrawal,” he says.

“One interesting new development to watch in the future is the impact of stress upon women. It is fascinating to note that women have actually survived under the stresses of today much better than they did 50 years ago. Life expectancy has increased for women but declined for men in recent years. However, we may soon see a reversal of that trend. As women discover the rewards men have found in money and power, they may pay the same price the system has imposed upon men. Lately, statistics indicate not only an increase in alcoholism among women, but in high blood pressure and coronary ailments as well,” he concludes.

The overall figures are astounding. Coronary disease has increased 500 per cent in the last 50 years. An estimated 30 million Americans have some form of major heart or blood-vessel disease, and an estimated one million have heart attacks each year. Of those, 650,000 will die, including 200,000 between the ages of 45 and 64. Approximately one of every five men will have a coronary attack before the age of 60. The corporate toll in loss of productivity due to coronary-related illness must necessarily correlate high.

Selye defines stress in its broadest sense as “some taxation of the body’s resources in order to respond to some environmental circumstance. In essence, the stress response is a mobilization of the body’s defenses, an ancient biochemical survival mechanism that was perfected during the evolutionary process, allowing human beings to adapt to hostile or threatening events.”

When a stressor is recognized, the brain sends forth a biochemical alarm or call-to-arms to all the body’s systems. Once the immediate threat dissipates or is overcome, the body tries to return to equilibrium. If the stressor continues, the acquired adaptation is eventually lost and a new stage is entered. The symptoms of the initial alarm reaction return. If the stress is unduly prolonged, the wear and tear incurred will result in damage to a local area or death to the organism as a whole.”

Ronald Norfolk, author of The Stress Factor, observes that “when stress is handled effectively it provides the motivation which encourages us to overcome the obstacles separating us from our hopes and goals. When it is allowed to get out of control it leads to sickness, low-level performance, and premature death” – all of which can have a devastating effect upon corporate productivity.

The most popular means by which companies are combating stress is through the development of their own physical fitness programs. The number of such formal programs has grown phenomenally in only 10 years. Pioneering Dallas companies – including Pepsico, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Xerox, and Texas Instruments – began hiring their own full-time athletic directors in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In 1974, the American Association of Fitness Directors in Business and Industry was represented by a scant three dozen companies. Today more than 1000 companies are represented in the organization.

National Chemsearch Corporation, headquartered in Dallas and with 6000 employees worldwide, was one of the early proponents of a full company-sponsored fitness program for employees. It now employs a full-time fitness director and utilizes nearby University of Dallas athletic facilities. Of the 700 employees at headquarters, nearly 50 per cent voluntarily participate in the programs. Additionally, 14 of the company’s top executives, including its 58-year-old president, Lester L. Levy, are members of The Aerobics Center which provides supervised exercise programs (including jogging, walking, tennis, and handball) and also researches the effects of physical exercise as a preventive to heart disease.

The most striking evidence that corporations are playing larger roles in stress management for their executives is the membership roster at The Aerobics Center. The list of 2200 members and 325 waiting candidates reads like a corporate Who’s Who in Dallas. Most are middleaged male executives who have been encouraged by their companies to pay more attention to their health. About 50 per cent are recovering from heart attacks. The membership fees are frequently picked up by the corporations.

While some doctors frown on physicalexercise as a good way to relieve stress,Aerobics Center founder Dr. Kenneth H.Cooper maintains that there is a direct correlation between the levels of physical fitness and coronary risk factors. Of 2600businessmen tested, with an average age of44.6 years, those in the poorest fitnesscondition had the highest cholesterol, glucose, weight, resting heart rate, and othercoronary risk factors. At the same time,men in excellent condition were the lowestin these factors. “This will surprise a lot ofpeople who say there is not enough evidence yet to show the relationship betweenfitness and coronary risk factors,” Dr.Cooper says.

Lester Levy points out that “when a person no longer is capable of withstanding stress he dies – in the broadest sense. Whether or not we can prove aerobic exercise will increase one’s life span or prevent coronary disease, we know it can improve mental attitudes because we can feel it happening at National Chemsearch,” Levy says emphatically.

Lou Neeb, president of the national restaurant chain, Steak and Ale, would agree. His company is the largest single corporate member of the Aerobic Center. It pays for membership fees and physical fitness testing for all of its top managers.

“We don’t hire people to fill jobs,” explains Neeb, a marathon runner. “We hire the whole person. We are committed not only to his physical well-being but his emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth as well.” While participation in exercise programs is not mandatory, an overwhelming majority of Steak and Ale managers and employees alike choose to participate. Neeb says the results are tangible: The company last year was cited as the most profitable in the nation’s food industry.

Not all companies which attempt to tackle the stress problem are convinced that exercise is the answer. Dr. John Batrus, whose Dallas-based psychological consulting firm serves many Fortune 500 companies and numerous other business clients throughout the United States, calls physical fitness programs “a good aspirin” for the stress problem. “Physical workout offers only a temporary discharge of tension,” explains Batrus, who works with 15,000 executives on a regular basis. “There is more stress among executives today than there has ever been. Much of it is due to the environment, the economy, and the rising demands of people. But the most devastating cause of stress is the proscription against feelings.

“People say things like, ’I saw Joe crying in his office the other day. He must be going crazy.’ You’re supposed to be objective and detached. What we’ve done is to encourage and condition ourselves not to attend to expressions of true feeling. The worst thing in society for a man is to be called ’an emotional guy.’ Companies don’t write out policies saying that if you feel, you’ll be fired, but the policy is implicit in the environment.”

Feelings, Batrus says, create energy. People expend tremendous amounts of energy in an effort to hold back feelings. The more one sits on feelings the more energy is required to keep the lid on. Bat-rus estimates that out of the 30 or more feelings one experiences during the day, male executives express only about four. “That’s why we have to have happy hour at the end of the day. Happy is a feeling. We’ve sat on ourselves all day and we’re whipped. But the work isn’t what made us tired. It’s the energy expended to hold back feelings. Corporate life often denies reality. We all have feelings, whether they’re convenient or not. They’re important to our survival,” Batrus concludes.

When keeping the lid on becomes too difficult, the symptoms of executive burnout result. Batrus defines the burnout syndrome as “a socially acceptable form of mental depression.” Among the symptoms are increased use of alcohol and drugs, inappropriate hostility or anger, boredom, daydreaming, loss of vitality and energy, predictability of routine, marital discord, sexual promiscuity, a sense of isolation and loneliness, procrastination, excessive worrying, feelings of worthlessness, and a host of physical aches and pains.

Many companies are beginning to hire outside psychological consultants to work both with the human problems and the human potentials of their employees. The goal is to enhance human productivity. Dallas-area companies which are taking the lead in this area include Fox and Jacobs, H.C. Beck International, Cessna Aircraft, Continental Trailways/Holiday Inns of America, and Otis Engineering. Most are optimistic about the early results.

In fact, if Bob Brown had worked for the Federal Reserve Bank he might be fully functional at his job today. The Federal Reserve, along with Crown Zellerbach, William Mercer, W.R. Grace & Co., and other large corporations, has installed employee assistance programs administered by independent firms such as Phelps’ Human Resources, Inc. Employee assistance programs are not counseling services. Rather, their function is to guide employees of participating companies to the best available professional resources in the community. If Bob had dialed an EPA hot line number, even without giving his name, program administrators would have assessed his problem and advised him of the possible alternatives.

Of the numerous ways companies deal with stress, perhaps the most innovative one has been implemented by the John Deere Co. in Denver. The farm equipment company has hired a concert pianist to present recitals so assembly-line workers can enjoy classical music during lunch breaks and coffee breaks.

Some executives have found that they can cope better by removing themselves from both the business and family environment for a weekend or even week-long solitary retreat. Such a place is Laos House, a rustic lodge ensconced in the woods not far outside of Austin. Director Bob Bryant says some executives need only to “check out” of society for short periods in order to renew their strengths. The unstructured, serene environment is specifically designed for people under stress.

Methods, strategies, and philosophies for dealing with stress on the job are numerous. But they all aim toward greater productivity. Perhaps the best sign that progress is being made is that many companies and executives who have suffered from stress are no longer afraid to talk about it openly and to share the knowledge they have gained to benefit others. When an executive doesn’t understand what is happening, stress can be a dark and devastating enemy. There are ways to cope and to restore one’s usefulness and sense of self-worth. And there are companies willing to lend their support.