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STRESS ARTICLE
The Effects of Stress in the Workplace and Stress Management Techniques
Written by Debra Peterson
- Is stress or anxiety adversely affecting your workplace performance, focus, or success?
- Has a stressful lifestyle negatively affected your quality of daily living?
The modern, fast paced business and technical work environment can promote high levels of stress, which can adversely affect workplace productivity. Studies have shown that workplace stress is a primary cause of employee health problems, low productivity, accidents, high turnover, absenteeism, poor inter-personal relationships, and increased health care costs.
Stress is a negative, internal disturbance of a person's normal psychological or physiological state, due to increased demands, threatening external forces, or stressors in a person's life. Stress is a common experience that comes with living, but excessive stress that is not reduced or managed in a healthy way can result in negative consequences. Stress can threaten your health, vitality, peace-of-mind, personal and professional relationships, and overall well-being.
Stress can be manifested by physiological and emotional changes such as: increased heart rate, rapid breathing, high blood pressure, tight neck/shoulder/back muscles, tension headaches, indigestion, insomnia, depression, fatigue, addictive behaviors, irritability, poor concentration, reduced productivity, or anxiety. Long term stress can negatively affect your immune system and the body's healing processes.
In order to cope with stress-causing changes in your work and daily life, you need to adjust and control your habitual responses to stress factors. Developing a new understanding of and balance of the body/mind/spirit connection, along with adopting a new holistic wellness lifestyle, can significantly decrease these negative affects.
Successful stress management can enhance your levels of health, wellness, and productivity. The first step includes identifying the stressors at work and in your daily life, and then developing healthy strategies to manage those stressors.
A Stress Management Strategy can include the following:
1. Deep relaxation breathing involves taking slow, deep breaths, while at the same time releasing any muscle tensions throughout your body. It is a great way to reduce stress and relax your body and mind.
2. Positive creative visualization uses your imagination to picture how you want to successfully handle any stressful situation that comes up, or to just take a short mental vacation from life's stressors.
3. Meditation or quiet relaxation time just for yourself. You can use this time to listen to relaxing music, image pleasant surroundings or situations, or just enjoy quiet reflective time to soothe the inner you. Let work breaks be time for deep relaxation, so that you will be better able to do tasks efficiently and with more energy.
4. Create a healing space in your work environment. Having an office space with windows, serene pictures of nature, or real plants will make your workplace a more pleasurable place to be in.
5. Regular exercise is a good way to relieve stress and tone both the body and the mind.
6. Develop a healthy eating lifestyle and proper nutritional intake, which can promote a healthy functioning mind and body.
7. Have a source of emotional release and support from family, friends, or a counselor, in order to be in a state of mental and spiritual balance with yourself and others.
8. Utilize various alternative healing modalities which work with the body/mind/spirit connection, such as yoga, massage, hypnotherapy, and Reiki. Reiki is an ancient healing system which helps to restore and balance a person's natural life force energy, brings about deep relaxation, and reduces stress.
9. Recognize the importance of and power of the body/mind/spirit connection, and actively participate in daily activities that revive and positively stimulate all three aspects of yourself. Concentrate on keeping a positive and peaceful state of mind, surround yourself with positive energy, and notice how much more content, happy, and productive you are at work and in your daily life.
Printed in the Spokane Journal of Business Newspaper, Sept. 1, 2005 , Health Care Section.
509-276-4028 or debraaht@gmail.com
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