How to manage stress at work
My aim in this article is to explain to you how people respond to stress. To manage stress you need to overcome negative self talk. I will explain how one person has trouble in the workplace.
Jane is 42 years of age; she has had no previous problems, no previous stress attacks, and no mental health episodes. Lately, she has been very distressed at work and has fears that everyone thinks she’s incompetent. She has become over-sensitive to her leader’s feedback and to the looks of her colleagues. You could say that she is slightly paranoid. The outcome of all of this is that she has become socially phobic. She finds it very difficult to go to parties with her husband. She tends to hide in another room so that she doesn’t have to socialize with people.
Jane is suffering extreme work stress. She has reached the point in her work life where everything is weighing her down. Her physical responses include feeling being physically sick, and even nauseous. She says that she is depressed, reports that she is afraid of making mistakes at work and feels that she cannot cope with work demands.
It is clear that Jane is not very productive or effective at work. She has limited stress management skills and she feels that her system is overloaded. Does this sound like you? Can you empathize with Jane? Do you feel as though things are on top of you? Have you lost the zing in your life and feel tired all the time? I your friends worrying about you? Is your life meaningless? Have you lost the ability to cope? Is your work suffering from how you feel?
If the answer is YES!!! – you are suffering extreme stress. And this is a very common phenomenon in today’s high paced society. Some people think that stress is an acceptable bi-product of our busy lifestyle. Research on cardiac disease after the 9/11 attacks showed a significant increase in cardiac ailments. These included high blood pressure, strokes, and heart problems. People’s physical states were impacted by their emotional states. And when people are not well emotionally they have difficulty being highly productive at work.
We need to know what causes this workplace stress. What are the factors that create problems for research work? There are many of them as you will soon see.
These include excessive workplace demands. Poor management and poor communication in the workplace cause stress. Oddly enough, poor relationships at home can cause workplace stress as much as interpersonal conflict with colleagues.
How do we cope with all these stresses in the workplace? This depends on you. Job changing is one solution but not a good one. A devious strategy for a bad boss is to list the boss’ name with a headhunting agency in the hope that your boss will get a job elsewhere. Poor role specification in my view is a major problem for workplace stress. If you and your boss have different views of your job, stress and conflict will emerge. The first step in dealing with stress is to outline ways of controlling the situation.
But what does this mean? Here’s the first message – YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK. You are your own pilot navigating your way through your own life. YOU are responsible for yourself. YOU can make the changes in your life if you want. If you are in a stressful situation, you CAN deal with the stress and the situation. The first principle is to know yourself and the nature of your self-talk. Most of how we feel is determined by what we think. We spend a very large amount of our day filling our head with self-talk – little conversations we have with ourselves.
This sounds simple but it’s a fact of life. We create our own problems because we run ourselves down all the time. We probably have 10 times the amount of negative thought to positive thought. We increase our tension and stress by constant self-criticism. The situation is exacerbated if our friends and family constantly criticize us. If we want to manage workplace stress we have to work on becoming more positive about ourselves.
