How ‘stress management’ can make your blood pressure soar

We seem to be in the grip of a terrible stress epidemic. According to a new study by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, a professional body for managers in human resources, two fifths of all organisations stated that stress-related absence has increased. It even causes terrorism, apparently: the mother of Paris suicide bomber Ibrahim Abdeslam said she believes her son might have blown himself up because of stress.

The total number of cases of work-related stress, depression and anxiety in the past year was 440,000, according to the Health and Safety Executive, up from 428,000 cases two years earlier. So extensive is this plague that, in the HSE’s view, stress accounts for no less than a third of all work-related ill-health cases. In practice, that translates into the loss of 10 million working days last year.

The problem seems particularly acute in the public sector. A Guardian survey of staff in the public and voluntary sectors, carried out this June by the Guardian, revealed that ‘93 per cent of respondents say they are stressed either all, some or a lot of the time’.