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The relaxation boom has found a warm welcome in America's citadels of stress: large corporations. The reason, experts agree, comes down to the bottom line. By encouraging workers to reduce the strains on their hearts, backs and psyches, corporations can begin to lower the $125 billion or more annually spent on total health care for employees, a figure that has been rising by 15% a year. In addition, Benson points out, many firms are finally beginning to appreciate the long-established fact that too much stress makes workers inefficient. In 1908 Yale Psychologist Robert Yerkes, along with J.D. Dodson, demonstrated that pressure improves performance, but only up to a point; after that, efficiency drops off sharply. Relieving the strain with relaxation breaks, Benson concludes, "actually enhances performance."
About one out of five of the FORTUNE 500 companies now have some sort of stress-management program. Many are restricted to top executives, though studies have shown that the most stressed workers are in middle management. In addition to facing the pressures of climbing the corporate ladder, these workers are caught in a perilous bind: lots of responsibility but little control. Those who have surmounted these obstacles and made it to the top "have the fewest problems," says Dr. Gilbeart Ceilings, corporate medical director of New York Telephone Co.
Corporate efforts to reduce stress range from the commonplace alcoholism program to on-premise exercise facilities, meditation classes and company-sponsored biofeedback. At the Equitable Life Assurance Society in Manhattan, employees with frequent stress-related health complaints participated in an in-house biofeedback program and reduced their average number of visits to the company medical office from two dozen annually to fewer than six. According to Psychologist James Manuso, who ran the project, Equitable saved $5.52 in medical costs for every dollar invested.
At New York Telephone, a program involving periodic health exams for all employees and meditation lessons for those with stress-related symptoms has helped cut the corporate hypertension rate from 18%—about average for U.S. firms—to half that amount. New York Telephone estimates that it is saving $130,000 a year from reduced absenteeism alone.
Results like these have created an enormous demand for stress-management programs, and a small army of entrepreneurs has rushed in to fill the vacuum. New York Telephone's Collings reports getting "three or four offers a week to conduct relaxation programs." Not all of them are bargains. In an effort to bring some order to the booming and chaotic field, Rosch (whose respected American Institute of Stress is nonprofit) is establishing a data bank with information on the cost and effectiveness of stress-management programs. The result, he hopes, will be "a kind of Who's Who in stress. Right now there's no sense of pedigree."
Rosch and others point out that no single approach to relaxation is right for everyone. "Meditation may be good for somebody with hypertension," says Rosch, "and bad for someone with a peptic ulcer." One