Air University Review, May-June 1983

Managing Stress in the Air Force: an Ounce of Prevention

Dr. James C. Quick, USAFR
Dr. Coleen Shannon
Dr. Jonathan D. Quick

The typical Air Force officer is effective at managing the various stress he encounters in Air Force life or he would not be there. This does not mean that it is impossible to improve both health and performance by refining and improving stress management capabilities. In fact, we are continuing to learn new things as well as refining established practices and procedures in an effort to improve the ways in which individuals manage their stress to achieve high levels of performance and health. The purpose of this article is, first to discuss what causes stress with particular attention given to unique sources of stress for Air Force personnel; second , we want to reinforce some of the healthful things you are already doing to cope with stress as well as suggest some supplemental and complementary activities that will add to your current capabilities.

What is Stress?

Stress is the naturally occurring patterned experience that we all have in response to any demand placed on us. (See Figure 1.) ¹ The stress response begins with the release of catecholamines (primarily adrenaline and noradrenaline) into the blood. These messengers stimulate the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system, resulting in the elevated physiological indicators shown in Figure 1. The extent to which these indicators rise depends on the number and level of demands that we are subject to as well as the variety of resources at our disposal to manage these demands.

As indicated in the figure, these demands come form a variety of duty and nonduty-related sources. Our resources for managing the demands are found within ourselves and in our social support system. For example, the young lieutenant who must brief the base commander on the unit’s operational readiness has the abilities, energy, and skills to meet this demand. He may need to get certain information form divisions, branches, or combat support groups to prepare his briefing. In doing so, he is drawing on his social support system, which is an important resource for him in meeting this briefing requirement.²

The responses to the demands we face include various behavioral, psychological, and physiological responses as well as the stress response. As Hans Selye points out, when we do not manage this experience well, we encounter distress, which has undesirable consequences such as depression (psychological), accident proneness (behavioral), and cardiovascular disease (physiological).³ All stress does not necessarily become distress. The alternative to distress, which occurs when we manage stress in a healthy way, is called eustress. The desirable consequences of eustress include exhilaration (psychological), high performance levels (behavioral), and freedom from disease (physiological).

Unique Air Force Demands

Any occupation or career pattern will make demands that create stress for the individuals involved in them. The nature and source of these demands vary substantially by occupation and organization. The U.S. Navy has conducted some interesting research that identifies the sources of stress for shipboard personnel.⁴ The demands of Air Force life are in many ways different from life in the other services, although there are some similarities. There are four sources of stress that we will focus on here: frequent transfers that Air Force personnel undergo, remote tours of duty, the up-or-out promotion system, and the supervisor and his work environment.

According to the Military Personnel Center (MPG), an Air Force officer may expect a change of assignment on the average every three years. This frequency in change of assignment creates a double set of demands for the officer. On the one hand he must adjust to the change of duty assignment and reporting official while at the same time easing the adjustment for his wife and children. The transition may be especially demanding where family members must be uprooted from well-established work or school relationships.

If the timing and location of the transfer can be anticipated, then this will reduce the uncertainty for the officer and his family as well as the associated stress. It is often the experience of uncertainty and the unexpected which causes individuals high levels of stress. This stress is reduced when the individual can anticipate possible major life changes, such as a transfer.

Another difficulty associated with a transfer is the disruption of the individual’s social support system. Our social supports are one key resource for managing stress-related demands in life.⁵ When our support systems are disrupted or reduced, this reduces the extent to which we may be buffered from the stress-related demands of life. Partly for this reason, Air Force personnel have generally evolved rather good mechanisms for providing social supports for transferred officers. Officers’ clubs, officers’ wives’ clubs, base housing arrangements, and related support mechanisms begin replenishing lost social support from previous assignments. Although these mechanisms may be available and useful, each officer and his family must still deal with the stresses associated with the change.

the remote tours of duty

While the normal, accompanied changes of assignment may be stressful enough, the remote tours of duty provide several different demands that the officer and his family must deal with. The Military Personnel Center indicates that an officer may expect three of these 12-to-18-month tours in a twenty-year career. There are two aspects of these tours that make them stressful.

First, the officer is separated from his family. The family is one key source of social support for an individual, and its temporary loss leaves a gap in the individual’s resource and defense base. Therefore, he is cast into the position of drawing more heavily on work-related support systems and developing nonwork-support based in the remote location. The associated stressor is the family’s loss of his social support. They too must adjust to his loss and supplement their social supports during his period of absence.

One combat pilot’s wife whom we know simply took herself and their two daughters and son back to her parents’ home in Kansas while her husband was in the Far East on a remote tour. This manner of managing the stress of the separation was a healthy way of drawing on the social support available in the extended family. A related way of achieving this same objective would be to settle in an established area where the family could draw strength from other Air Force families.

The second stressful dimension of remote tours of duty is in dealing with the diversity, newness, and strangeness of a different culture. Each culture evolves its own unique patterns of behavior, customs, language, and ways of relating. It is very demanding to learn new ways and new modes of behavior in a new land. This may be either eustressful or distressful, in part depending on the officer’s unique interests and characteristics. Some individuals find this adjustment process difficult and distressing while others enthusiastically enter into the new situation with one eye to learning and growing. Therefore, depending in part on how the new culture is approached, it may be a healthy source of stress or a difficult experience.

up-or-out!

The force structure that legally exists for the Air Force leads to a somewhat unique set of circumstances and stresses in the promotional process. Because an officer must make each promotion to the next grade by a specified time or be mandatorily released from active duty, he is subject to great stress to be constantly at peak performance. It also places great stress on the officer effectiveness reporting system, since one or two bad OERs may result in a delayed promotion or failure to be promoted.

The system is not a uniformly bad system even though it places substantial stress on each person moving toward a promotion. While this individual is experiencing stress, the system simultaneously removes potential barriers for junior and field grade officers by providing advancement opportunities. Without the regular and systematic force structuring, this natural pattern of advancement would not exist.

For those who are not selected and are therefore forced out of the Air Force, the distress of the experience is somewhat eased by the amount of lead time provided to the member. This time provides a basis for planning future activities. However, if the individual does not use this time effectively for planning, the results may be more than a little distressful. An Air Force major who was mandatorily retired at 24 years of services conducted an in-depth study of six fellow officers who were similarly retired. Of these six fellow officers, three were dead from heart attacks within two years after retirement. These three had done no planning for their post-Air Force lives and had actively resisted their mandatory retirements, wasting their final months in the Air Force doing little if anything.

The other three officers had used their final active-duty months following their notification constructively planning a post-Air Force life.. They actively sought out new career options and were making successful adjustments to new careers five years following retirement. These three exemplify the healthful ways in which the stress of up-or-out may be managed so as to elicit growth and productivity. However, leaving is not necessarily the most stressful aspect of Air Force life.

the boss and his style

Commanders, bosses, and other supervisors are in a unique position to cause stress for their men either wittingly or unwittingly. For example, the leadership style adopted by a manager has long been seen as a potential source of tension for subordinates.⁶ Authoritarian behavior on the part of a leader tends to cause pressure and tension for subordinates because of the high number of influence attempts undertaken by the leader. This underlying tension among subordinates under authoritarian leadership tends to be expressed in one of two ways. One way is for the subordinates to become very outwardly calm and passive, repressing much of the tension and hostility which they experience. This repressed (as opposed to expressed) anger will be converted into elevated blood pressure over extended periods of time.⁷ The second way is for the tension to be expressed in spontaneous outbursts of conflict and aggression in the workplace. While it may be healthier for individuals to express anger and tension, as Doyle Gentry and his associates point out, the conflicts will generate some stress for others around them to cope with.

The effects of authoritarian supervision were observed in a combat-support unit several years ago during an organizational diagnostic procedure. Part of the diagnosis involved a group of seven supervisors who worked for an autocratic division chief. When asked what their boss expected during an intensive group interview, a supervisor using crutches responded humorously by saying that he had ordered pontoons for his crutches. Another supervisor, in describing his perceptions of the work environment, related his recurring night dreams of hurricanes, tornadoes, and ocean storms that constantly raged over him (his boss?) and around him (his tense, fellow supervisors?), though he was never seriously hurt by the storms. Virtually no overt signs of conflict and tension were exhibited in the workplace. Rather, a deceptive calm existed that could be seen through during in-depth interviews with the supervisors. The emotionally turbulent, stressful work environment was apparently attributable to the interpersonal behavior of the division chief, since supervisors working for another division chief in the same unit and did not have similar descriptions of the work environment.

The use of less authoritarian and dictatorial tactics certainly does not mean that the commander or supervisor is any less "the boss." As in the unit observed earlier, the nonauthoritarian division chiefs were very clearly in charge of their sections with good morale and good mission effectiveness. This parallels results found by Rensis Likert studying the productivity of work units managed by nonauthoritarian leaders.⁸

Managing Stress

As we mentioned before, the typical Air Force officer is already doing many things to manage these and other stresses of Air Force life effectively. Our purpose here is to reinforce what you are already doing that is healthful, supplement your current ways of managing stress, and suggest things to do that you are not currently doing, The purpose in effectively managing stress is not to eliminate it but rather to achieve a healthy state of eustress while preventing the onset of distress with its adverse consequences of poor performance, depression, and cardiovascular disease. Three major activities for preventing distress are exercise, nutrition, and relaxation.

the Air Force physical fitness program

The Air Force program for physical fitness is among the best stress-managing activities in which one can engage. Regular physical, aerobic exercise has been found to be very conducive to promoting good health, well-being, and stress management.⁹ Cardiologists such as Kenneth Cooper have been advocating physical fitness for strengthening the heart muscle as well as improving overall physiological functioning. Physically fit individuals are physiologically better equipped to cope with stress than individuals who are not physically fit. This is because they have lower resting levels of catecholamines in their blood, and these are the triggers which set off the entire stress response. In other words, fit individuals are not as "wired" as unfit ones. In addition, fit individuals use oxygen more efficiently and recover physiologically from emergency situations more quickly than unfit individuals.

Civilian industry is now taking the lead from the Air Force physical fitness program and other service-related fitness programs. Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Xerox Corporation, and Texas Instruments are among the industry leaders in advocating physical fitness. Recently, Tenneco has also followed this lead by completing construction of an $11 million physical-fitness complex in Houston, Texas.¹⁰ The central role of physical exercise in better stress management is found in the preventive preparation it affords the body for managing stressful situations.

Exercise may be overdone, however, by either getting too much or attempting to establish a program too quickly. One young lieutenant we know realized that he had fallen woefully out of shape in the two years since officer training school. As a result, he resolved to reestablish a high level of fitness and initiated that with a first-day back regimen of 2.5 miles of run-walk. Unfortunately, he overdid it and strained a few muscles, making his next few days difficult. He need not have done that to begin his fitness program. By contrast, we know a dentist who began very gradually at the age of forty and hardly ever had a sore muscle. Within a two-year period, he had gotten to the point of comfortably running a half marathon in less than 1 hour and 50 minutes. He also coupled his exercise program with a weight loss program.

When the dentist began his exercise program, it was in part motivated by 25 excess pounds. The excess weight he carried was causing him two difficulties. One difficulty was that by the end of the day he experienced fatigue as a result of carrying around so much "excess baggage." The other difficulty, though asymptomatic, was the stress the excess weight was putting on his heart and blood pressure. His heart had to work harder to carry the load. Responsible weight control and proper nutrition are integral elements in proper stress management. They are also directly related to fueling the body effectively and efficiently for physical exercise. It has been pointed out that the average American diet is hazardous to your health.¹¹ Not only are we suffering from a variety of health problems associated with obesity but our reliance on processed foods has also brought on massive malnourishment. According to Dr. Michael Colgan, the more we overeat the fewer nutrients we get so that we can actually starve while wallowing in fat.¹² The diet of the average American is between 60 percent and 70 percent fat and sugar, leaving no room for other needed nutrients.¹³ Thus, it is possible to eat more and get less.

The problem becomes even more critical when the individual experiences an increased stress level. In his description of the stress response syndrome, Selye points out that the body calls on reserves of nutrients for a repair process to maintain body functioning.¹⁴ However, if the nutritional raw materials are insufficient, a stage of exhaustion and disease can develop. Consequently, it is important not only to consider one’s usual diet, being sure to include nutritional food, but also to consider vitamin supplements. The vitamin B complex and vitamin C seem to be the most heavily used during stressful times, and they can easily be taken in addition to one’s food, boosting the level of availability to the body.

While good nutrition, responsible weight control, and physical fitness are all related to preparing the body to manage stressful situations as well as dispose of excess stress-induced energy, they alone are not often enough. We frequently need to counterbalance this activity approach to stress management with an inactive, passive approach. This approach is sometimes found in the prayer practices of various Judeo-Christian denominations as well as the nonreligious practice of the relaxation response, such as transcendental meditation. If the stress response may be thought of as the general mobilization of the individual’s physiological and psychological processes for an emergency situation, the relaxation response may be thought of as its natural counter.

The effects of the relaxation response on the body have been investigated by Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and others.¹⁵ The findings suggest that the following changes occur with the relaxation response: lowering of the heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate; reduction in muscle tension; shift of the brain-wave pattern to alpha; reduction of alcohol consumption (when practiced over time); and increased sense of health and well-being. These changes are associated with practice of the relaxation response on a daily basis.

There are four key components of the relaxation response: a quiet environment, a comfortable position, a passive attitude, and a mental device. Benson describes how these may be combined into a simple procedure for eliciting the relaxation response: Select a quiet environment, sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, deeply relax all your muscles, breathe through your nose, and continue this practice for 20 minutes.

The ability to relax has proved to be a valuable skill to people in all walks of life; inventor Thomas Edison and Prime Minister Winston Churchill come to mind. Some of our past military leaders have used this ability to let go of tension to help them get through very difficult situations. For example, it has been reported that General Dwight D. Eisenhower was able to rejuvenate himself through the most tense time of the invasion of Europe by utilizing catnap-type relaxation breaks. Consequently, he was able to remain alert and on duty for extended periods of time.

Once you have learned the skill of deep relaxation, you can use momentary relaxation as an on-the-spot skill when dealing with stressful situations. Simply pause for a few seconds and turn your attention to your body, allowing yourself to relax as much as you can. You will find by using this brief unstressing technique that your thought processes will be much clearer, enabling you to deal more flexibly and creatively with the situation.¹⁶ You may also want to use momentary relaxation as a way of unwinding after a stressful situation is over.

Although the approaches to managing stress described here will not prevent stress from being a part of your military life, by using these ideas together with your already developed ways of management, you can increase your ability to manage stress. The adding of exercise, nutrition, and relaxation can prevent the development of chronic anxiety known as stress buildup. By preventing this buildup, you are then preventing health hazards and promoting a sense of well-being.

One of the principles of preventive management suggests that individuals and organizations respond differently to stress; that is, each of us has unique and specific points of vulnerability to stressful life experience. As a result, what may cause one person cardiovascular disease will cause another ulcers and a third individual deep depression. The adverse consequences of distress therefore manifest themselves in quite individual ways, depending on one’s physiological, genetic, and psychological life history.

As a result of this realization, we may suggest only general guidelines for managing stress on a tentative basis. Individuals must modify and adapt these general approaches to suit their particular circumstances and personalities and also supplement these general guidelines with the personalized activities that work most effectively for them. To propose a universal and dogmatic approach to managing stress would be irresponsible and ineffective as giving all people a universal drug to take on a regular basis.

Author's note: We thank Brigadier General Howard L. Brainin, Mobilization Assistant to the San Antonio ALC Commander; Ron Wong, Assistant for Reserve Affairs, San Antonio ALC; Lieutenant Colonel Humberto G. Gruz, USAFR, Director of Personnel, 301st TFW (AFRES); Captain Donald W. Banks, USAF, 7th BMW (SAC); Suzanne Warner, graduate assistant at the University of Texas at Arlington; and Beverly Kale for their efforts in the review and preparation of this article.

Notes

1. Figure 1 is adapted from J. C. Quick and J. D. Quick, Organizational Stress and Preventive Management (New York: McGraw-Hill, forthcoming).

2. John House, Work Stress and Social Support (Reading, Massachusetts, 1981), pp. 15-26.

3. Hans Selye, Stress without Distress (New York, 1974), pp. 25-32.

4. E. K. Eric Gunderson, "Organizational and Environmental Influences in Health and Performance," in B. T. King, S. Strevfest, and F. E. Fiedler, Managerial Control and Organizational Democracy (New York, 1978), pp. 43-60.

5. House, pp. 84-85.

6. Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph K. White, Patterns of Aggressive Behavior in Experimentally Created Social Climates," Journal of Social Psychology, 1939, pp. 290-93.

7. W. Doyle Gentry, Alan P. Cheney, Howard E. Gary, Roger P. Hall, and Ernest Harburg, "Habitual Anger-Coping Styles: I. Effect on Mean Blood Pressure and Risk for Essential Hypertension," Psychosomatic Medicine, 1982, pp.195-202.

8. Rensis Likert, New Patterns of Management (New York, 1961), p. 95.

9. Kenneth H. Cooper, The Aerobics Way (New York, l9~8), pp.81-85.

10. Personal Interview with J. W. Streidl, Director of Management Development, Tenneco, Inc.

11. John W. Farquhar, The American Way of Life Need Not Be Hazardous to Your Health (New York, 1978), p. 103.

12. Kathleen Stein, "Dr. C’s Vitamin Elixirs," Omni, April 1982, p.69.

13. Rudolph Ballentine, Diet and Nutrition: A Holistic Approach (Honesdale, Pennsylvania, 1978), p.’⁰.

14. Selye, pp. 23-26.

15. Herbert Benson, The Relaxation Response (New York, 1975), pp. 46-53.

16. Karl Albrecht, Stress and the Manager (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979), p.199.

James C. Quick (BA., Colgate University; M.B.A. and Ph.D., University of Houston) is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a captain in the USAF Reserve attached to the 7th Bombardment Wing Heavy (SAC) at Carswell AFB, Texas. Dr. Quick is author of Basic Management: An Experience Based Approach (1981) and coauthor of Organizational Stress and Preventive Management, forth-coming.

Coleen Shannon (BA., Texas Christian University; M.S.W.. Tulane University; Ph.D., Texas Woman’s University) is Associate Professor, Community Service Clinic, Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Shannon has written numerous articles for professional journals and has won teaching and social worker awards.

Jonathan D. Quick (A.B.. Harvard University; MS. and M.D., University of Rochester) is Chief Resident at the Duke-Watts Family Medicine Center, Durham, North Carolina. Dr. Quick was health management advisor and editor of Management Sciences for Health. He is coauthor of Organizational Stress and Preventive Management, forthcoming.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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