How To Manage Stress At Work

In order to understand stress and how to manage stress, you need to know how people respond. Specifically, people need to know how to overcome negative self talk. To make this practical, I will describe how Jane operates in the workplace.

Why is it that Jane, 42 years of age, suddenly has difficulty going out with her husband? When she goes to parties she hides away from everyone. This behaviour seems to stem from her workplace where she feels everyone is critical of her. She was stressed at work. She feels she doesn’t have her colleagues’ respect. She believes that her boss is overly critical.

Jane is experiencing work stress and this is a major problem. Everything seems to be too much of a burden for her. She is having physical reactions of nausea and illness. Her work demands are too much for her and she can’t cope and she feels depressed and anxious all the time.

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.

There are many stresses in the workplace. But what in particular elevate our stress levels? Unfortunately there are many workplace stress triggers.

In the workplace: overload, new load, long hours, pressures and even no ability to control your workplace or your workload. Organizational issues: poor management; lack of leadership; poor communication; political interference; transfers; redundancy. Inter-personal Conflict: your supervisor at work; a work colleague; your partner; your children; your family.

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.

I know this sounds simple but it is true. We constantly run ourselves down and criticize ourselves. We have probably 10 times more negative and dysfunctional ‘self-thoughts’ than we have positive self-thoughts. More than anything I can think of, this tendency to be continually self-critical causes the greatest tension. And guess what, if we have friends, family, loved ones who also criticize us unrelentingly, we are really in trouble. The challenge is simple – if we want to improve our lives we have to change our thinking.

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