Stress management

By: Audra Starkey
Now my line of work takes me to an airport and Friday mornings at an airport can be absolute chaos. It's the start of the weekend, lots of people returning home or just wanting to get away for a mini-escape, and this is exactly how it was yesterday. All flights to all destinations were full, the check-in queues were massive, and lots of people were missing flights because of a new airport motorway that had just opened up that morning.

As you can imagine there were lots of frustrated, disgruntled and unhappy passengers - and who do you think they take these frustrations out on? You guessed it ... the customer service staff on the ground, which includes 'Moi" and all of my fellow colleagues.

Now after 'Disgruntled Passenger Number 6" - I was starting to feel a tad stressed and a bit tired of being the receiver of such aggression. Some days I feel like I'm just a highly paid punching bag (well, I don't know about the "highly paid" bit). Anyway, by mid morning most of us felt like we desperately needed of a good cup of coffee to help alleviate the stress.

Well that was what I thought until yesterday. You see I had just finished reading an article from Yuri Elkaim's Eating for Energy book the night before, highlighting the negative effects that coffee has on the body if you are stressed.

Some of these included the following:

* Coffee actually intensifies stress causing an average 40% increase in adrenaline. This results in increased blood pressure, heart rate, perspiration, nervousness, and irritability.

* Coffee also increases the secretion of stomach acid by 400%, contributing to gastritis and peptic ulcers.

* According to a British Medical Journal, coffee drinkers have a 50% higher risk of heart attack.

* Coffee causes a significant loss of nutrients - magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc, and B vitamins.

* Coffee is a major source of cadmium which is a heavy metal that has been linked to cancer and immune suppression.

Now if you're a woman - the facts are even scarier.

* Coffee is linked to ovarian cancer, bladder, and kidney cancers.

* According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, coffee increases the risk of miscarriage and can double the rate with just 1 cup per day!

* Coffee reduces fertility. More than 1 cup per day makes a woman half as likely to conceive (American Journal of Epidemiology).

So next time you're feeling stressed - don't go for a latte, 1/2 cap, flat white, mocha, full strength expresso or whatever - because you may as well stick your hand in a power point!

Instead, reach for a Green Tea which contains the natural mood enhancer Theanine, which has been shown to reduce mental and physical stress and promote a feeling of relaxation.

Ahhh ... now that's the kinda thing that I'm looking for. Perhaps we should give out complimentary cups of Green Tea to passengers as they arrive at the airport? 

In need of some more tips to help you cope with stress at work?  Then I recommend you sit down and study a Free Report called - "Why Shift Workers Are So Tired, Unhealthy & Unhappy- And What YOU Can Do to Fix It!"

Whether you're a shift worker or somebody that just struggles with stress and fatigue in the workplace, this report is going to open your eyes to a completely different way of coping with fatigue and stress in the workplace. Click Here For Instant Access To Your Healthy Shift Worker Free Report