Practical Approaches to Overcoming Workplace Stress

Understanding the Nature of Workplace Stress

A large share of working people carry strong anxiety or stress about their job and their working life. The causes range widely, from an excessive volume of work and friction in relationships to dissatisfaction with how one is evaluated and anxiety about the future.

Stress itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The Yerkes-Dodson law holds that a moderate level of stress improves performance. The problem is a state in which stress becomes chronic and no time can be secured for recovery.

Cognitive Approaches - Adjusting Your Thinking

Recognizing Cognitive Distortions

In the thinking of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the cause of stress lies not in the event itself but in the interpretation placed on it. Faced with the fact that a manager pointed something out, the level of stress changes enormously depending on whether you interpret it as proof that you are incompetent or as being shown a point to improve.

Concretely, simply recording your thought patterns for one week makes unconscious habits clear and brings the first handhold for coping into view.

Common cognitive distortions include all-or-nothing thinking (anything short of perfect is failure), overgeneralization (concluding from a single failure that you always fail), and the mental filter (ignoring the good side and attending only to the bad).

Keeping a Thought Record

This is a method of recording, for a situation in which you felt stress, the circumstances, the automatic thought, the emotion, the evidence for it, the evidence against it, and a balanced thought. Writing it out lets you observe your own thought patterns from the outside.

There is no need to keep it up every day. Recording only the situations where stress was especially strong is enough to bring the tendencies of your own thinking into view.

Behavioral Approaches - Changing Your Environment and Habits

Clarify Task Priorities

If you try, for instance, to handle all tasks with the same urgency, you fall into a permanent sense of being chased. Using the Eisenhower matrix (four quadrants of urgency by importance) to concentrate on the tasks that genuinely matter is effective.

By working in a planned way on the tasks that are important but not urgent, you can prevent tasks that are both urgent and important from arising in the first place.

Take Strategic Breaks

Concentration is said to decline after roughly 90 minutes. Bringing in the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of work plus a 5 minute break), or breaks on a 90 minute cycle, lets you sustain performance over time.

Leaving your desk during the lunch break for a short walk is effective too. Even a few tens of minutes of walking somewhere you can see trees and sky loosens the tension you have been holding and makes it easier for your afternoon concentration to return. Recovery is faster when you switch the whole environment of sight and sound than when you rest inside the office.

Set Boundaries

Answering email outside working hours, overtime with no limit, extra work you cannot refuse. These arise from the absence of boundaries. Saying no is a rational judgment made to protect your own health and productivity.

That said, setting boundaries is sometimes difficult depending on the culture of your workplace and your position in it. Rather than demanding a large change all at once, it is realistic to start with a small scope.

Physical Approaches

Stress accumulates not only in the mind but in the body. Regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and a balanced diet are the foundation that raises your tolerance for stress. Aerobic exercise in particular promotes the secretion of serotonin and endorphins and is effective in improving mood.

Important Considerations

Self-care has its limits. If low mood or a loss of motivation continues for more than two weeks, if insomnia has become chronic, or if physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach pain, or heart palpitations occur frequently, consulting an occupational physician or a mental health professional is strongly recommended.

Also, when the cause of stress lies in a structural problem such as chronic understaffing or harassment, individual coping alone does not amount to a fundamental solution. Calling for improvement of the workplace environment is an important option as well.

Making Use of Your Relationships With Colleagues

There is no need to carry workplace stress on your own. Dialogue with a colleague you trust has a considerable effect in easing stress. That social support functions as a buffer against stress has been confirmed in a great deal of research.

However, a relationship that consists only of trading complaints has the potential to reinforce negative feelings instead. Constructive dialogue in which you think through solutions to the problem together is what works.

Key Takeaways

• Cognitive approaches - adjusting your thinking
• Behavioral approaches - changing your environment and habits
• Physical approaches
• Recognizing cognitive distortions

Summary - Start with Small Steps

Measures against workplace stress become more effective when the cognitive, behavioral, and physical approaches are combined. There is no need to put all of them into practice at once. Start by choosing one method that looks like a fit for you and giving it a try.