We often find ourselves reacting in a high-stress manner to today’s fast-paced, demanding, and pressure-riddled workplace. Anger, hostility, impatience, time urgency, and tension are the key behaviours of this approach. Research continues to indicate that a high-stress work style threatens health, decreases a sense of well-being, inhibits happiness, and negatively affects workplace morale.
By adopting a low-stress approach, you can maintain a demeanour of calm, don’t have the compelling drive to “fight the clock,” consider the needs of others, create a cooperative work and/or home environment, and stay healthier.
You spend more time at work than anywhere else during your life. Work is a venue where stress can run rampant. Actually, it has been said that work is nothing but organized stress. Each day you face tight deadlines, have too much to do with too little time and resources, experience conflict with co-workers or supervisors/managers, try to manage ever-changing job demands and technology, and work yourself into exhaustion.
If you make a significant change in the way you experience work, there could be profound results on the quality of your life.
Someone said, “If you want to change your life, you must first change the way that you perceive life.” Even a small shift in perception can produce tremendous power and advantage to change thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. This, in turn, can have positive effects on your professional and personal lives. In addition, even on the world!
We seem to talk about stress a lot. We say were “stressed” about certain things. It isn’t clear to some, what stress really is. Many people consider stress to be something or an event that happens to them. Others think that stress is what happens to our body, mind, and behaviour in response to an event. Stress does involve events and our responses to those events, it is really our thoughts about the situation in which we find ourselves which cause the stress. In other words, everyone experiences “stressful” situations differently, some don’t think the situation or event is stressful at all while others will. When something happens to us, we evaluate the situation mentally. We decide if it is threatening to us, how we need to deal with the situation and what skills we can use. If we decide that the demands of the situation outweigh the skills we have, then we label the situation as “stressful” and react with the classic “stress response.” If we decide that our coping skills outweigh the demands of the situation, then we don’t see it as “stressful.”
Symptoms and results of stress can affect your body, your thoughts and feelings, and your behaviour. Becoming aware of these can help you to better manage your stress. When stress is left unchecked, it can contribute to health problems such as high blood pressure, headaches, digestive issues, heart disease, obesity, or diabetes. I can also affect your work and personal relationships due to your behavior changes. Knowing how you personally react to stress can offer you insights into how to manage it more effectively.
Identify your stressors.
We all have certain “hot buttons” or triggers, those events, situations, behaviours, etc. that instigate our stress response. By being aware of what these are, you can begin to see patterns in what annoys, frustrates, and irritates you. When you can do that, then you will be better able to control how you respond to them
Increase your laughter.
Humor tools can keep you from being stressed. Instead of getting mad, get funny. You can “sharpen your humor scissors and cut to the laughter.”
Think of laughter as a release valve for the tension and pressure you experience during the course of a day at work. By laughing, you will reduce your stress. Laughter is a physiological response. When we laugh, our entire body reacts by releasing the chemicals of well-being (endorphins) and helps us to cope more positively. Laughter also enhances relationships. By using your wit and wisdom, you can empower yourself. You can also choose those behaviours that will create the kind of environment at work that works for you and your colleagues.
One more thing to remember, not all stress is bad, in fact, stress is the catalyst that propels individuals to higher achievement, but only in small doses. It is the long-term, on-going stress that creates physiological damage to our bodies and minds…..so a little stress can actually be a good thing, just be sure to leverage it to your advantage!
Twenty years ago I had a conversation with an operations director. He was saying that he one of his main attributes was being a patient man. I told him you should never say such a thing because even Gandhi had a temper. Everyone has a breaking point. Rather than saying you have patience you should be saying you have a high tolerance for stress. Of course, he politely informed me I was wrong and that I don’t know anything. Then a few weeks later when stuff really hit the fan, the director lost it — yelling and hammering tables. I can’t remember what it was about, but I do remember the reaction of this patient man.
Every one has their breaking point. Know what it is and do your best to stay clear of it.
Good advice, Chris. And, yes some people can take more than others before “blowing up” but it is very important to recognize the signs when that point is nearing and to employ some sort of strategy to deflect enough of the stress to allow things to “calm down” again. Many people do not do that for themselves and end up in trouble. Here is something interesting to note about stress, though: not all stress is bad. In fact, stress is the catalyst that pushes humans to higher achievement, but only in small doses. It is the long term stress that can cause irreversible physiological and psychological damage. So we need to pay attention to how much stress we are facing and employ strategies that work for us to get rid of some of it.
Sorry I forgot to identify myself before I replied to you, Chris, thanks again for your insightful input.