Episode #349 Stress Is Mounting In Japan And What Can You Do About It

PM Abe’s sudden announcement closing every school in the country from Elementary level on and up created immediate panic buying of toilet paper, face masks and people stocking up on rice and other long lasting food products. This has pushed anxiety levels much higher. Hokkaido is in lockdown and the Covid-19 virus keeps popping up in unanticipated locations. If you are unhealthy and or over 70 years of age, then you definitely don’t want to catch this virus, because the mortality rate for that grouping is relatively high.

For everyone else, the health concern while real it isn’t the most concerning issue. Business disruption impacts the livelihoods of many, many more people. The majority of companies in this country are small medium sized enterprises (SMEs), seventy percent of which don’t make a profit. Yes, they arrange their accounts to run everything they can through the books to avoid paying tax, but how much cash in reserve do they have? The stressful elements are will I get the virus and will my sole source of salary, my company, go under, when the cash runs out?

In 1929, the crash of the New York stock market triggered panic with a wave of spending cuts to preserve cash, which led to less spending, which led to layoffs, which led to even less spending, which led to even more layoffs, until the world was brought to its knees. This is exactly what every leader of an SME in Japan is doing right now. They are nervous, anxious, worried. Yes they are washing their hands and wearing a mask against the virus, but more damagingly, they are stopping all spending to preserve cash. This axing of spending has an instant impact and immediately sends out ripple effects, turning into a tsunami rapidly spreading through the economy. This builds into a major recession, on top of the minor one we have already from US-China trade friction and the increase in the consumption tax.

In your company, you expected that invoice payment, but it didn’t turn up in the bank account. This keeps expanding and is happening at pace. All the employees are really worried about their salaries and their jobs, if the company goes bankrupt. Everyone feels the danger and the uninvited stress which comes with that. Two incomes was a safety net and forty six percent of married couples both work, but who looks after the kids at home, now the schools are closed? What happens next, how long will this last, will my family be okay, will I lose my job? These are very stressful times for all of us, me included.

What can we do about any of this? When we are stressed there are so many serious concerns competing with each other, we can be blinded to the key issues. We are anxious and battling through a fog of stress induced confusion most of the time. A blocker is needed to stop this mental rollercoaster. We have to cut through our many concerns and work out clearly just what is the key problem. Unless we can identify the key problem, we have little hope in fixing anything, as we just go round and round, worrying ourselves into depression. This finding the key factor isn’t as easy as it sounds, because there are so many factors at play. Which one is the key one?

The solution is to take one clear action - start writing down all of the concerns floating around in your mind. Somehow the act of writing helps us to refine what we are thinking. We need to get these problems out first and then get them into priority order. Is this easy - no! But it forces a higher level of thinking about what we are facing.

Are there any constants, threads, themes, similarities or specifics at play? Having sorted that prioritization out, we now have to dig a bit deeper and look at what are the causes behind these problems. We can identify the symptoms, but what are the root causes of the troubles we are suffering? This again needs some analysis and often we are not operating with a lot of numbers we can rely on, to pick out the threads of the root causes. We often have to go on instinct and this is an imperfect science.

Having ascertained what is causing the problem, well what can we do about it? Go beyond the headlines in the media and Government announcements and isolate out how you take individual actions for your family and your business.

We start digging deep for solutions, for ideas, for innovations which will provide us with a way forward. This is a brainstorming process and the object should be to throw up as many ideas as possible. We do this on the basis that even a crazy, impractical idea might be the trigger for a really great idea. The excellent idea may not have emerged with out the stimulus of the crazy idea in the first place.

Having drawn out a broad range of possibilities we now need to whittle these down to the best ideas. We start evaluating the consequences of taking possible actions on these ideas. We will distill the best solution in this way and now we have created a roadmap for ourselves. Through action comes clarity and the solutions flow forth. We need to get the battle plan into priority order for the execution piece. We are trained in business to execute and once we get a plan together, we can start to move forward and get out of the hole we have been lodged in for some time.

Dale Carnegie wrote a whole book on this subject, called “How To Stop Worrying And Start Living”. He was thinking that we needed to find a way through the worry stage and get out of that hole we have dug for ourselves. If we don’t do this we will see our stress continue to mount up. Anxiety will paralyze us unless we make sure it doesn’t.

Once we find that way forward, we get on the front foot and we can exercise more control over our attitude and our circumstances. This means we can start living in a full and complete way, because we have thrown off the yolk of stress and we are now tapping into our full potential.

Today we know the connection between stress and illness and we can’t take it lightly. The virus won’t last forever but the likelihood of our lives becoming less stressful in the future is slim. We are better off finding ways to deal with it for both today and the future.