Stress Is Mounting In Japan And What You Can 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 numbe