An extremely interesting study which was undertaken during the sixties and is still very relevant today was a study done in the US by Holmes and Rahe. It showed that the most stressful events in our lives are not connected to work at all. They include the death of a spouse, divorce, marital separation, etc.
They asked people to rate their key life stressors according to how much personal readjustment was required to deal with them. They called these the life change units (LCUs). They then used the LCUs to determine the likelihood that people would become ill in the future.
They showed that they could predict with significant accuracy those would stay healthy and those who would become ill with stress over the following twelve months using just their LCU scores.
|
