How Unrelieved Stress Hurts Your Productivity: Accident Proneness

Another way that unrelieved stress can hurt your productivity is that it can increase your chances of having an accident.

The more physically or emotionally exhausted a person is, the less attention they pay to their surroundings. This inattention and preoccupation makes them far more likely to have an accident.

With prolonged stress, your body tries to save your life by pulling the blood from the large muscles and diverting it to your liver and kidneys in an effort to break down the extra stress hormones. When this happens, there is less blood in your arms and legs. This can lead to greater clumsiness. You drop things or you can trip, stumble and fall.

Although the following example isn’t related to stress, (I don’t think), it does show how a decreased blood supply could lead to greater clumsiness and an increased danger of injury. Two of my sons were almost eleven pounds when they were born. When I was pregnant with them, every time I stood up, the blood supply to my right leg would be cut off. Within seconds my leg would go numb.

As well, if I did not change position, the nerves to my leg were affected and the feeling would leave my leg. I could hit it and feel nothing – just like hitting a board. It was almost as if my leg was paralyzed. I had to be so careful when this happened because if I tried to walk, I would fall. I had no control over that leg.

There is another way that stress can make a person more accident prone. Remember that the body can’t tell the difference between physical danger and emotional stress. It responds the same way – by preparing your body to fight or run away to save your life. With increased stress, the body dumps extra glucose into the blood stream to give you the energy to fight or run away. To assist this process, it also dumps more insulin into the bloodstream.

If a stressed person skips breakfast, which is very common, the extra insulin can cause hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. This can make you feel weak and dizzy because your brain isn’t getting enough nutrition. If you have ever felt weak and dizzy, you can see how easy it would be have an accident.