My Journey

Over the next few weeks, I will writing about my experiences of suffering from stress.  I'll look at how it starts and the various stages of the "journey" that I went through.  But it kick things off, I thought I'd write an overview of my experiences...

We’re all different.  And whilst that’s a great thing, it is something that we don’t always appreciate or recognize. 

If you work in an office, there’s probably a chap who sits in the corner and, in the main, keeps quiet.  You might sometimes talk to him about last night’s football match or a film that was on Channel 4 the previous evening.  He seems nice enough, but you don’t know much about his personal life.  After all, there are loads of people in the office and you can’t be best friends with everyone.

The majority of the time, he will be a perfectly happy individual, with a good life, both at work and outside of it.  However, sometimes there’s a bit more to it than that.  The perfectly happy looking chap in the corner could have depression or suffer from stress.  The same could be said for the IT consultant, the “wacky” woman who dresses up for Children In Need every year or even the manager who’s making sure you hit your targets.  The truth is that stress and depression can often be completely hidden.  I know, because I’ve hidden it myself!

Not because I didn’t trust people or didn’t want to talk about it. But because….well actually that’s not easy to explain.  In fact, it’s completely illogical and can’t really be understood.  It is a mental illness, so I guess it’s bound to be irrational!

I’m a cynical man – I think Deal or No Deal is fixed (My opinion, not that of AUM!) and I’m not convinced by the Moon landings.  As such, I was pretty cynical about stress and mental illness.  To me it seemed like a good way for people to have a few weeks off work on full pay!  Even when I was showing signs of stress, I didn’t fully appreciate the reality of it.  I thought I was just feeling a bit down, getting a bit annoyed too easily, getting upset too much.  After all, nobody else was commenting on it or making a big deal of it.  My managers at work didn’t notice anything wrong, but why would they?

Then something happened.  Not anything major or memorable, but something that just tipped me over the edge.  I can’t even recall it entirely, just a piece of work that I found difficult or confused about.  I’d love to tell a story here about an epiphany, some major incident that pushed me over the edge, but it’s not like that.  The upshot was that I went home feeling terrible, upset and unable to really understand why.  I’m not writing this for a sympathy vote or to pull at the heartstrings, so I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say, my girlfriend got me to go to the Doctors immediately and the Doctor declared that I was suffering from stress and I had many symptoms of depression.

I’d always thought 5 months off work sounded like a great idea!  But until the final week of my hiatus, it didn’t feel like I was off work at all.  Counselling, mental exercises in my head, sitting around worrying, long walks on my own were the order of the day.  Actually the long walks were good, apart from when I got caught in a hailstorm in the middle of a field one day. That hurt! Although if you ever need to take your mind off something, I can recommend standing in the open air in a hailstorm, you’ll forget what’s bothering you in an instant.

All the time, I had to have faith that the process I was going through (which included various legal drugs!) would work.  The Doctors, the counsellor and my girlfriend all told me it would, it was just a case of me having their faith, because most of the time you can’t actually envisage yourself getting better.  I spoke to a couple of friends and family members about it, but kept it from other people.  Not because I didn’t trust them but because I preferred to have people who didn’t feel like they had to tread eggshells around me.  And that’s one of the strange things about depression – you can keep it from people and they can be none the wiser. 

Without wishing to sound like I’m linking into a sales pitch, AUM are here to stop you and people at your organisation from being like I was.  We also do other stuff, and you can find out about that here.

Luckily for me, my story has a happy ending. Shortly after recovering, I landed this job at AUM and am now in a position to help other people who may be experiencing something similar to what I went through.

The point is that you can take steps to ensure that you don’t end up suffering from stress, and you can help people who work for you having the same problems.  If you’d have asked me 15 months ago, I’d tell you to not bother and that you/they just need to get a grip.  But that’s utter nonsense and I now think it’s great that companies like AUM exist to help yourself and other avoid reaching breaking point.