Dealing with Work Stress

Dealing with work stress.

Are you a stressed employee? Results continuously suggest that workplace satisfaction and career satisfaction produce positive mental health and self esteem. Research also suggests that greater values-consistent living is negatively related to depression, anxiety, stress and burnout, and positively related to overall health. These two issues taken together can provide some clues as to how to better deal with work stress.

Dealing with work stress should be easier, people have been generating research and literature on how to decrease work stress for decades. With all this information, why aren’t people dealing with work stress better? If you are dealing with workplace stress what can you do? As you would suspect if you have read other pages on this website, the focus of this page is you and what you are doing, not on others and what they are doing.

Dealing with work stress Step 1

Take a survey of what you are doing to handle all stress in your life.

Dealing with work stress entails examining your normal stress responses and attempting to work on how you manage stress overall. We define stress as your emotional response to events that are triggers.

The first question is, how are you handling your emotions? Are you using strategies to control them that are unsuccessful and preventing you from living a happy life? Do you hide, distract or numb yourself from painful feelings? Do you try to control your mind by insisting you feel differently than you do or by pushing down the feelings you are experiencing? If you are using these techniques and they are not working this is not surprise.

Dealing with work stress Step 2

Get some distance from your experience.

One of the keys to reducing stress, anxiety and depression is understanding that we create our own stress. I know you haven’t been taught to think about stress this way. It’s frequently described as something external that happens to us. It’s not your fault that you create your own stress. Our mind when left unattended will frequently get out of balance and create all kinds of trouble for us. The first step in getting some distance is to recognize that your thoughts are not necessarily true or urgent. Thoughts are words inside your head. That is all. Often we make the mistake of believing our thoughts are true just because they are there. They aren’t.

Practice this week observing your thoughts as if they were not important. Say to yourself “ I am having the thought that…..” This can often help you to realize your thoughts are separate. See if this practice over the week doesn’t yield some important information about how you are reacting to your thoughts and causing yourself distress. If you enjoy this exercise explore some more mindfulness practices, these are incredibly helpful tools to give yourself a different perspective on your life.

Dealing with work stress Step 3

Accept your Thoughts and Feelings.

It is important to stop resisting your experience and acting as if it were dangerous. Creating a sense of danger in your mind frequently is what causes stress and anxiety. You don’t have to run from feelings of unhappiness. Fear, anger and sadness are just emotions. They cannot harm you. In accepting what you are experiencing, paying attention and not struggling against it, you open up to the possibility of changing your experience. Its counter intuitive but it works. See if it isn’t true!!!!!!!!

Dealing with work stress Step 4

Explore your values.

Now that you have observed your experience, and allowed yourself to truly see what you are experiencing, you are in a much better place to start to explore your stress. On your deathbed what would you like to have accomplished?

What would you want your children to say about you at your funeral?

Your grandchildren?

Your wife?

Your family?

Your neighbors?

Your colleagues?

This exercise is different for everyone and there are no wrong values. Write it down, keep it handy. Often when people do this they are surprised to find that the choices they make every day are in contradiction to their values and are taking them further away from what they would like to accomplish.

Dealing with Work Stress Step 5

Are you living consistently with your values?

Look at your values exercise. Do you have a sense for whether you are living consistently with your values? Think about your thoughts and actions every day. Are they consistent with what you articulated to be your values? If you die today will your love ones say of you what you want them too?

Keep in mind research shows this to be extremely important for our happiness. If you are not living a life consistent with your values you will be unhappy. If you are, you are likely to be happier and to experience less stress ,anxiety, and depression.

Dealing with Work Stress Step 6

Make a plan

Begin to look at how you are living your life and start to make a plan. Remember to check your thinking. Are you being tricked into thinking your thoughts are true? Are you having thoughts you believe that are preventing you from living in accordance with your values? Continuously refer back to whether your thoughts are helpful. If they are not, call them out.

Proactively work towards living more consistently in line with your values.

Let’s say you are in a job where there is tremendous stress and there isn’t much joy. You get some distance from your thoughts and you realize that you feel trapped, you have a lot of negative self talk going on,and you feel bullied by your colleagues or supervisor. All day long your thoughts trap you here.

You recognize that you are drinking to escape as a way to handle your stress. Your number one value is to be a great father, but your drinking and preoccupation with work take you away from your children.

Let’s say that you have a family, you have debt, and there are not a lot of other job opportunities out there now. How will any of this help?

Once you start to get some distance from your thoughts you will see that you do not have to believe them. Perhaps you will realize that you are constantly thinking about how you should have your supervisor’s position, what a fool they are and how they consistently undermine your work. We have established that there aren’t a lot of options right now in the work force and that you have to stay where you are. How is what you are doing helping you to live a life in accordance with your values? How are these thoughts helpful?

They aren’t. Challenge yourself not to believe them. Challenge yourself not to escape them.

Dealing with Work Stress Step 7

Begin to take steps to think about what your life would be like if you were living in accordance with your values.

What would you be doing if you weren’t escaping from work by drinking and watching tv? What would you do if you were being a good father? Start to map out steps towards that goal.

You can also start to map out steps towards your long term career goal, whatever it might be, even if right at this moment it isn’t feasible.

There may be proactive steps you can take at work to address some of the external issues and actually reduce work stress. However, these techniques will help illuminate that problem solving path for you. They will also stress proof you so these situations will become significantly less importantThink about your work with your mind as a step towards happiness. You are moving in the right direction! Leave dealing with work stress for more about stress