Change can be stressful. While a change may be as good as a rest, our brains can be threatened by the uncertainty, and it takes mental energy to shift habits, unlearn old ways and learn new ways.
How much change is too much?
You may have read or heard something like: ‘moving house is more stressful than divorce’. This is usually based on research that asks people to rank the stress of various life events. The best-known is probably the Holmes-Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Holmes and Rahe (1967) developed a unit score for a list of 43 stressful life events. If you add up the scores of all the events you’ve experienced in the previous year, you can predict how likely you’ll become ill from the stress.
Have a go – you can try the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory here.
I’ve just done it and I’m over 300, even though I haven’t experienced any of the top stressors! (And note how even supposedly positive events, like holidays, have an associated readjustment score.)
Although the research can be critiqued, the idea that there is a stress load – that stressful life events on their own may be manageable, but when they come together, the cumulative effect can push us over the edge – is an important one. Although there will be some changes we can’t control, as individuals we may have more control than we think on the timing of some of these events. You might choose to avoid or delay changing job if you’ve just had a child, for example.
And of course, this has implications for change events in organisations too. A lot of the changes they impose on their employees are choices (upgrade of IT systems, moving offices, restructuring and downsizing etc) and therefore the timing can be adjusted. So if you’re going through something exceptional like the Covid19 pandemic, which is causing widespread disruption for everybody, you have to stop and think: is now really the right time to insist everyone change their passwords?
It might be something really small that finally pushes people over the edge…
See the next post for more on this idea.
References:
Holmes, T.H. and Rahe, R.H., “The Social Readjustment Rating Scale“, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Vol 11, Issue 2, August 1967, pp 213-218.