Is stress affecting your life?
Our performance at work and in life is greatly affected by our physical and mental wellbeing. Stress, a much used word in society today, is starting to play an increasingly significant role in our wellbeing, our health and our lives.
While all stress should not be considered as negative, it is clear that excessive stress is now making a huge impact on the health of the nation and has links with lifestyle diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome, Coronary Heart Disease and Chronic Pain.
Optima-life using Firstbeat HEALTH provides a route to recognising how your body is dealing with stress, both from a physical and mental perspective, and, gives you the tools to optimise your performance and your recovery.
Getting to Know Yourself - Real Time, Real Life
In order to understand how stress is affecting your body it is important to get a clear picture of your body through a significant period of time.
Firstbeat HEALTH works like a camera, showing you how your body and mind lives and copes with your life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. It looks at real life in real time. If used on a regular basis it can assist clinicians and just as importantly help YOU understand how your body and mind are coping with life.
Benefits to the practitioner
- Provide objective data on stress and recovery, clearly identifying overload
- Identify high stress periods and related levels of recovery
- Analyse and assess times of stress and recovery in relation to specific activities
- Provide objective data on the quality of sleep in relation to physiological recovery
- Used alongside other forms of evaluation allow the development of realistic, informed and personalised health/life strategy plans
- Impact positively on the patient giving improved patient compliance
- Using objective data helps you to make an impact on your patient – not just words and rhetoric
Benefits to the patient
- Provides objective data that is personal to you
- Highly visual data will clearly identify your times of stress and recovery
- Easy to understand reports that are highly motivational
- A practical tool to achieve a better body, a better mind and better health
- Real time, real life data acts like a camera to show you how your body lives and copes in your world
Essentially Firstbeat will demonstrate whether there is a balance between activity, stress and recovery. All states are good for you but any one state in excess is not considered optimal.
The balance can be shown with a timeline (see above) or as a score that shows the balance over a particular time (see below).
Firstbeat can analyse your recovery both during the day and night. Just because you are asleep does not always mean your body is achieving optimal recovery. The physiological quality of sleep is also demonstrated.
The cost of stress
Government figures for 2006/2007 show that:
530,000 |
over 530,000 people in the UK reported some form of work related stress, as the cause of illness1 |
1/3 |
work related stress accounts for over one third of all new incidences of ill health2 |
13.8 million |
working days lost as a result of work related stress, depression or anxiety added up to 13.8 million days in 06/073 |
12 million |
In the UK 12 million people see their GP’s each year with mental health problems mostly related to anxiety and depression. Stress is often identified as the root cause 4 |
45 million days |
An estimated 45 million working days are lost each year through anxiety and stress-related conditions - costing industry more than £3000 million5 |
Sources:
1 Self reported work related illness (SW106/07) http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress↑
2 Health & Safety Executive↑
3 Self reported work related illness (SW106/07) http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress↑
4 www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk↑
5 http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/information/mental-health-a-z/stress/↑
