BURNING THE CANDLE AT BOTH ENDS MAKES FOR SHORT FUSES

There was nothing unusual about Sharon Anderson's weekend.

After finishing her classes at Southeast Missouri State University on Friday, then spending time in the university theater's costume shop, she drove to Poplar Bluff for her weekend job at a used book store.

She worked until 2:30 the next morning, which allowed her to get at least a couple hours of sleep before heading to St. Louis that Saturday to buy books for the store.

She was back in Cape Girardeau on Sunday, dropping off one of her daughters at the SEMO District Fair and taking her other daughter out to eat. And that was just the weekend.

During the week, Anderson sits in a classroom for many hours as a nontraditional student majoring in secondary education. This semester alone, she is taking classes in economics, sociology, philosophy, dramatic criticism and Shakespeare.

In the afternoons, she works as the costume assistant for Rose Theater, creating the wardrobe for several productions each year. Occasionally, she emerges from the wings and performs on stage herself. And somehow, through it all, she manages to respond to the demands of her daughters, ages 16 and 10.

"I don't like to sit and do nothing," she said. "I've always been a doer. Even when I'm watching a movie, I'm usually doing something, like sewing or reading."

But with that activity comes stress. At times she feels like running away. More than once she has driven three hours to a place on the Current River near Van Buren for a few moments of peace and quiet. And, she confesses, at other times she explodes with screaming, yelling and temper tantrums.

She is not alone.

Parents trying to cope with the demands of the workplace and the needs of their children, students attempting to hold down full-time jobs while going to school, others crowding their busy schedules with even more committee meetings or activities -- all of them know the stress that comes from burning the candle at both ends.

Debbie Leoni compares it to a person trying to juggle too many objects. Some things you can hold, if only for a moment; other things are up in the air; still others have dropped to the ground. According to Leoni, people have to choose what they want to juggle or they may end up dropping everything.

She should know. Not only is she a single mom, with the responsibility of getting her children to school, church, four soccer practices and three games in a single week, but Leoni, a registered nurse, also works full-time overseeing the Southeast Missouri Hospital Fitness & Wellness Center. Part of her duties include teaching stress management.

Stress, according to Leoni, is not unique. It comes with every job and every role in life. Because of that, it can be anticipated and planned for. It simply requires looking at the roles and jobs available in life and deciding what expectations are reasonable from those roles. Knowing the expectations lets people anticipate how much stress will occur.

Yvonne Menke, a psychiatric recreational therapist with Southeast Missouri Hospital and Leoni's colleague, says there are three types of stress: environmental, physiological, and cognitive.

Environmental stress is brought about by things outside the individual, such as job or relationships. Physiological stress comes from within-sickness, pain or even the process of aging itself. Cognitive stress is the stress people create in the way they think about things.

The key to any stress, according to Menke, is putting things in perspective.

"It's not so much what happens to us, but how we react to it," she says.

Menke also offers some practical things to consider for people feeling the stress of burning the candle at both ends. First, look at self-care issues: Sufficient sleep, good diet and nutrition, proper aerobic exercise. Keeping fit makes coping a lot easier.

It is also important to have several people available who can act as a support system: a spouse, friends, a church family, a support group, even a pet. What is crucial is to have someone to talk to, someone who will listen when it's time to vent.

Equally important, according to Menke, is the ability to set limits, to say no and to not feel guilty about saying no.

Leoni agrees. "People want to say yes to everything, but we must choose what we want to juggle. We can't maintain high stress forever. Eventually, we'll blow up at people we care about or develop stress related illnesses."

Both Leoni and Menke say the key to stress management is the ability to set priorities and to take care of what's most important first.

It's not always easy.

"There are not enough hours in a day to do everything I want to do," admits Sharon Anderson as she sits in the costume shop, surrounded by work.

"I'm learning I can only do so much," she says, then adds with a shrug, "but I'm a slow learner."