Keeping your cool at work: making life less stressful
THERE were a whopping 9.8m working days lost to stress last year, according to research by the Health and Safety Executive. That’s 435,000 people who reported a case of work-related stress. That is dreadful news for everyone from the individual sufferers to the economy at large. But it’s not all bad: Neil Shah, the director of the Stress Management Society, says we should also see stress as a good thing. “Stress exists to give us an early warning sign. If we listen to our bodies, we can prevent psychological and physical ill-health and stop ourselves missing work,” he says. The adrenaline stress pumps around our system is designed to gear us up for the fight or flight reaction. “Stress is great when confronted with a sabre-tooth tiger; it’s not so great when sat in front of a computer.”
The trick in managing your stress at work is to read the early warning signs and act pre-emptively, says Dr Phil Hopley, a specialist in prevention and treatment of stress at LPP Consulting. He explains that prevention is always better than cure when it comes to mental health: “The symptoms of a stress problem are physical, psychological and behavioural. People need to be able to analyse themselves to catch these problems early.”
But how does one spot the signs? Psychologically, Hopley says stressed people are unusually irritable and bored at work. Physically, they suffer from sleep problems, fatigue and headaches. Behaviourally, they have poor concentration, are forgetful and disorganised. “We call it ‘presentee-ism’, the stage before the employee becomes an absentee due to stress,” says Hopley.
If you can catch the problem at an early stage, there are plenty of ways to stop the problem escalating. Shah says stress management is really effective time management: “It’s so important to plan your day before you start. The constant flow of information from email and text messages makes people think they have to do everything instantly. This is not true. If you schedule in an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon to deal with messages and refuse to allow yourself to get distracted by them during the rest of the day, you will discover you get much more done.”
Strategic performance consultant John Swain says people who are stressed can use tricks to make their to-do list more manageable: “Take out your list and rank the items in order of priority.”
The system works like this, you label the items: (A) Must be done or my head will roll. (B) Need to get this done because other important actions depend on this one. (C) Only on my to-do list because I haven’t delegated it or can’t say no. (D) Nobody but me will notice if this one isn’t done. (E) Vital for the future but doesn’t need to be done today. Then, Swain explains, you must do (A) instantly, do (B) next, (C) and (D) are where you are torturing yourself, stop it and forget about them. Then use the time you would have spent doing them to do (E).
Even simpler tricks can work wonders too. Shah says it is important to step away from your desk every 90 minutes to allow your brain rest so that it works more effectively. These little pauses don’t have to last long, as little as 30-90 seconds will suffice. Shah says you should use the time to grab a glass of water (not coffee or sugary snacks, these are stimulants that will only cause your blood pressure to rise further).
Stress levels can pass the point of self help. If so, Hopley says eight to twelve sessions with a therapist should get sufferers back on track: “Of course, far fewer appointments are needed if you take preventative action, sometimes as few as two or three.”
Adding stress prevention to the top of your to-do could save you time and money – maybe even get you promoted.