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Career Feature

Beat the Heat at Your Workplace

By   |  Dated: 05-27-2010

Managing stress at workplace is essential for better performance as well as a better life. However, trying to fight with stress and visualizing stress as an obstacle to overcome can pile up more stress and leave you confused and exhausted.

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The way to cope with stress at workplace begins with identifying the sources of stress and understanding that not all stress is negative or abnormal in nature. Next, we require to sort through the types of stress and separate the causes of unhealthy stress in our daily routine. These need to be addressed in the proper manner to create a more enjoyable and productive life, and boost your career in the process.

How to know healthy stress from unhealthy ones




Linguistically, anything that causes you to exert yourself and puts extra pressure on your nerves or emotions is a cause of stress. If you work, then work related stress is a normal healthy part of the routine that is dissolved with completion of work and acts a driving force for your success and achievement. However, work-related stress can also be irregular, abnormal, and negative if they are created by misperception of things.

For example, a pink slip is a normal part of workplace culture in today’s world as much as an employee resignation. It is a part of the reality of any workplace and can be a cause of vague stress, which motivates you to work better to secure your position. However, if your are immobilized for the fear of getting a pink slip then that is negative and abnormal stress. In short, stress related to work that is normal routine and makes you more productive is healthy stress. Stress that increases your anxiety and reduces your productivity is unhealthy stress at any workplace.

In the given example, it seems that your perceived situation is of a certainty of losing your job, but uncertainty about when the axe is going to fall. You absolutely need to remove the cause of such stress and bring a greater measure of certainty to your life. In the given situation, you can do this by securing another job, or by talking out with your superiors about your fears. If you believe that your fear of losing the job is justified due to your own shortcomings, then either improve yourself or get a different work, which is more aligned with your skill sets. This can be within the same workplace or in another.

How to handle stress

To handle stress at workplace effectively, the principles are more important than the actual techniques you use. Ranging from aerobics to yoga, and motivational sessions to shrink shops the number of solutions offered in the market are endless. Sometimes, the psychiatrist’s bill creates more stress than the cause for visiting a psychiatrist. It is better to know the principles and why one feels stressed to deal with stress realistically.

Avoid, Accept, and Reconcile

Stress is caused whenever expectations are not met or there is uncertainty about meeting expectations. So, if your expectations are aligned with the reality of a situation, stress can be avoided to a large part. Mostly in the workplace, inadequate time management or inadequate skills cause stress. Self-improvement is the key to deal with these kinds of stress. Another major source of workplace stress can be behavior of co-workers of superiors. In these cases, the usual strategy is to avoid, accept, or ignore. If normal methods don’t work then it is better to talk it out with your co-worker or superior about the matter. Establish open channels of communication and most of co-worker related causes of stress disappear. It is important to establish your boundaries and communicate to others what is tolerable to you and what is not.

Leaving or changing the workplace, though a definite option, is usually an extreme or last option for handling workplace stress.

In worst cases, look for and get another job while you still have a job.



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