I firmly believe that some people do not feel a great deal of pressure from their source of income. In other words, some folks don't suffer work stress, or much of it. Maybe they just know how to handle it, and it rolls like water off a duck's back.
I did not marry one of those people. I did not realize this until later in our life -- but it had been there all the time. I had cues and clues, but no clear category under which to place them, until finally, everything added up and I found "work stress" as the answer.
It's a beastly thing, if you have it, or if your husband suffers from it.
Naming it, owning it, discussing it and finding alternate avenues of handling it took years for us. Don't let it take that long for you.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ~~Matthew 11:28-29
When Stress Comes to Stay
Never did I realize how purposefully God moves until several years into marriage, when I realized how much stress my husband carries daily, and that I have an important role in that stress ... to help relieve it.
However, in our first few years of marriage, I didn't recognize the way stress built in him -- I simply couldn't understand his behavior. I worked, too, in those years, and every Sunday night I felt the mania that a looming Monday morning brings to so many nine-to-fivers in the working world.
While I could shed the irritations and aggravations of the work day, my husband continued to wear his. I thought he just didn't have any desire to relate to me and often wore his heart on his sleeve along with a chip on his shoulder, when really, his feelings of stress multiplied and coated him in layers. Within a few years of working his first job, he had wore a cloak of stress as his main wardrobe item ... and it clashed with everything.
Hanging back, not wanting to irritate him, I didn't ask many questions. When I did, he didn't have enough experience with his working world self to understand how much work weighed on him. Any irritation he felt he often placed on me.
Sufferers of stress often place blame on those unaffiliated with the stress and a spouse sits as Target #1. Always there and easy to hit. Unrelated to the source of stress, a wife brings on a different kind of stress: dependence on love, need for emotional give and take, a share in the financial gain from the stress source (job), and the living day to day with irritating methods of toothpaste tube folding, taking all the covers at night, and wanting to have a life that does not take place in front of the television or computer screen.
When job stress takes over, the little irritations grow to the size of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons without warning.
I didn't catch onto the fact that his temper flared easily beginning on Sunday morning. I didn't realize that his lack of enthusiasm for any activity I suggested lay in his long-time habit of worrying about the upcoming week well in advance. This tendency overpowered his capacity for diversion and joy, and I did not have a concept of how to effectively redirect his attention from those worries or to stop from adding to them inadvertently.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? ~~Matthew 6:25-27
The Void Faith Should Fill
Work stress becomes a habit and worsens in a personality that has no outlet for it. It feeds on itself and on every activity outside its usual domain that requires planning, social/family interaction, financial input, or infringement on "free" time. The hardest habit to break in a work-stressed husband is the "escape factor" -- zoning on mindless activities that lead nowhere for long periods of time (electronics, television, gaming). The man I married inherited his inability to handle stress (not at all or ineffectively), and learned how to react (panic, anger, worry, negative thoughts, diversion, escape) instead of act (solve problems, think positively, pray, manage resources, engage in physical activity), probably before birth. Because I did not grow up with that kind of pressure from the inside out, I did not come equipped to combat it.
God would have been our answer, and would have filled the void we both had at that time in our marriage. We did not invite him in ... or rather, we did not let him out of the church at our wedding.
We did not have a faith hold in the early years of our marriage, and it showed. We struggle and we flailed wildly in all directions, hoping to hit a moving target we could not identify. We made it through with lots of emotional baggage which we carried for years. We worked together, commuted together and spent most of our time together, and while we enjoyed much of it, I had the role of talking him down from the ledge whenever an attack of stress hit -- and my methods became predictable and distasteful ... and added to his stress level.
We did not talk about stress or how to manage it because we didn't realize that was the answer to the questions we didn't ask. Neither of us prayed, and we felt the invincibility of the 20-something years. Physical ailments and hard economic choices hadn't touched us. We hadn't had any run-ins with dire circumstances. The false feeling of "can do" no matter what or how large the challenge ruled in our lives. Faith, though I called myself a Christian, had no role in our individual lives.
We stayed together because we had vowed to, didn't think we had another option, and figured if we fought hard enough for our own individual versions of "right", someone would win. Neither of us would give up or give in, and neither of us would give up our desire to be right.
We earned our scars.
In future years, as hardships involving finances, child-bearing woes, job changes, and forced separations due to work travel entered our lives, God began to squeeze in, too. He's merciful like that.
Categorizing Stress and Containing It
As difficulties crossed our path or entered our lives and put down roots, we struggled against each other harder. I had the answers and so did he, and few of them matched. Life had to hit us several times before we could see the whole picture ... that so many areas of life don't need to be scheduled or require back-up, and most of the good things happen when we don't feel like doing anything more than collapsing from mental exhaustion. We have to let our hearts fill with good things to build a strong framework of positive outlook and possibility, rather than look at each day as just another purveyor of doom and gloom, and someone else's emergencies.
Work stress still happens, but the life events that have taken place anyway have framed it better. Work will always offer stressful situations and my husband will always bring the level head in handling other people's emergencies.
My husband had to have knee surgery in order to feel what "no stress" feels like. He had to take a month away from work to remember how it feels to sleep through the night and to sit back and enjoy his children and his life. He had to leave the office to realize that mindless or repetitive escape activities served only to fill time and alienate people. He had to turn in the wrong directions in order to experience the grace and mercy of the Right Direction.
Now, 20-plus years past those years of struggle and confusion built on lack of understanding and short experience, we have the stressors named.
- work
- financial stability
- lack of real rest - sleeping well, but also having recreation ... something to do that has a product or a definite positive effect on life, and is measurable in some way. Hobbies, exercise, family time, etc., make the difference between purposeful and wasted time. These things allow for mental rest, even though they require attention and focus. They offer a different kind of "stress", and ease the unhealthy pressures.
- feeling faithless - as we learn more about faith and put it to work, stress decreases. Faithlessness puts more pressure on self, to succeed and to provide and to maintain life independently. Growing faith reverses those pressures.
The Fix
- God. The Customer Service Professional. Go to Him first.
- the Bible. No self-help book exists that will offer answers to carry a work-stressed person over the course of a working lifetime like the Bible. To enhance the experience, prayer has a direct line to the Author for questions and feedback (Tweet, if you like). No self-help writer can beat that. Go there. It works.
- prayer - as the wife of the work-stressed husband, this has led me to find new ways to meet the stress head-on, to divert my husband's learned behavior of "zoning", and to encourage him in multiple ways every day. Without prayer and growing faith, I could not be the help-meet in this situation. Because of prayer, I have power, and my husband has the blessing of it.
He gives power to the weak
and strength to the powerless.
Even youths will become weak and tired,
and young men will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.
~~Isaiah 40:29-31
Coming to Terms with Stress
Struggling with stress may never completely. Going back to the "fixes", of turning to God, reading the Bible for answers and review, and an intent prayer life will improve it to whatever degree the stressed person and you, his wife, will help him achieve. You are his help-meet, and that doesn't mean just handing him tools for fixing the faucet, or making sure he eats healthy foods -- it means guiding him when one of his rudders is broken or when his compass is off. It means carrying through while he is carrying on in a state of confusion. It means never giving up on him.
For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. ~~Jeremiah 29:11
Your experience with work stress may not have the all-encompassing qualities that my husband has experienced. It may come and go, or run in predictable stints. No matter how it happens, the fixes work.
You live these trials to understand the experience. Name them to get a grasp of what they do and how they affect life. Then, fix them. You have the Book and the Author at your disposal, and you will find no better source of help.
What is your experience with work stress? How have you combatted it with God's help? What advice would you offer to those struggling with it?
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