The third annual Work Stress survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, shows that work stress is swiftly on the rise for American workers. The results showed a marked increase from last year’s survey, which found that 73 percent of respondents were stressed at work. This year, that number jumped to 83 percent.
Too many of us accept stress as “the nature of the beast” and make little effort to neutralize it. However, rising levels of job-related stress can take a toll on one’s health, increasing the risk of heart attack, accelerating the aging process and even raising the risk of diabetes.
To help reduce such problems, it is important to understand new and better ways of coping with the pressure, so here are a few tips to help reduce your stress to more manageable levels:
1. Identify the root cause. It is common for us to vent our stress “safely” rather than have the difficult conversations that would address the real issue. We scream at traffic when we are really angry at our boss or we become overly critical of our loved ones when we are just frustrated with our own
inability to manage our finances. Analyze where the stress is coming from and confront it — or them — head on.
2. Manage it. It is a fact that things bother us a lot less when we are rested and healthy. Get enough sleep, make an effort to eat more sensibly and exercise and life becomes much more manageable.
3. Let go. Much of our stress comes from expending energy on things we can’t control. No amount of agonizing over the weather, for example, is going to make any difference as to what will eventually occur. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.
And finally…
4. Take a breath. As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Take the stress out of your work-force training. For information about the Association’s regionally recognized professional development courses, please contact Dan Monaghan at 814/833-3200, 800/815-2660 or dmonaghan@mbausa.org.
