Let's say your employer sent you an email about a task that needs to be done. Automatically, a physical response known as the fight-or-flight response is triggered as soon as your body and mind react. Your muscles tense up, your breath becomes more rapid, and your heart rate increases. While thinking to yourself, "I'm going to get fired if I don't finish this," you work late into the night to complete the assignment in order to control your anxiety.
What transpires, though, if you regularly endure difficult situations at work?
This chronic work stress might eventually result in burnout. So, what are the indications we should watch out for to see whether we are already feeling stressed out or burned out from our jobs? Here is a list of the signs.
EXHAUSTION
When you feel exhausted at work, you're under the stress of your job, which can have a detrimental impact on your emotions, close relationships, physical health, and job performance. Emotional exhaustion, feeling drained and lethargic, and feeling fatigued at work are all strongly related.
CYNICISM
Low levels of commitment, mistrust, blame, criticism, political posturing, polarization, pessimism, negativity, and sarcasm are all signs of cynicism's harm. In addition, skepticism increases with employee age and experience.
REDUCED EFFICACY
A rising sense of not having accomplished anything worthwhile at work is brought on by burnout. As you might guess, this can be extremely soul-crushing, particularly if you're used to success or are enthusiastic about your profession. It can be concerning when burnout sufferers begin to exhibit this third symptom and express concern that they find it harder and harder to complete their tasks at work.
Most people do not have a thorough understanding of stress. Given that stress is known to have numerous detrimental effects on both your physical and mental health, it is frequently viewed with suspicion. Additionally, stress can interfere and degrade the quality of your relationships as well as your performance and productivity at work. Low levels of stress, however, are beneficial. This is due to its adaptive function, which enables you to gather and focus all of your energies on the current task.
However, a lot of individuals today deal with excessive amounts of stress, which is simply unhealthy and makes things worse than they already are. Nowadays, every worker has dealt with workplace stress. It is simpler to develop coping methods to deal with these extreme levels of stress. So, if you're wondering how to handle workplace stress, here are a few tips that can help to better cope with stress.
MAKE A DAY PLAN:
End your day with making a plan for the next days ahead.
MAKE SURE YOU KNOW YOR TASKS:
Making a list of your tasks in order of priority. This is helpful for ensuring you don’t get off track with lesser priorities or tasks that can wait a few days
MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR CO- WORKERS:
For some of us this may be counter cultural but often you find your co-workers are struggling with very similar problems or you may have shared interests. This creates community and networking
AVOID UNNECESSARY CONFLICT:
Sometimes to avoid conflict you have to be the bigger person and take the high road. Often this looks like being humble, settling to not be right and aim for the necessary results even if it means taking the long way to get there.
Own your mistakes and learn from them. We don’t always get right the first time.
Be gracious. Sometimes we just need to show a little grace. We may not know what our supervisors or co-workers are going through that cause their attitude or disposition to be shall we say, annoying.
STAY ORGANIZED:
We typically start off organized then slowly get off track. When this happens, take a step back, reset, and then re-organize/prioritize
AMBIENCE:
Bring greenery (plants/flowers) into your workspace
Put of positive words of affirmation
Stop to pray/meditate on God’s goodness
Be thankful even in the small things
AVOID MULTITASKING:
This is very hard to do especially if you struggle with managing which priorities need to come first. Our natural default is to try to do them all a little piece here and a little piece there. However, what tends to happen is we get quickly stressed out trying to do everything.
So, ask for help when needed
Tell people to wait if it’s not urgent
Its ok to say no if the tasks do not fit
Anyone can experience workplace stress because it is a natural and common occurrence. High amounts of work-related stress, however, can negatively impact your relationships as well as your physical and mental health. Finding techniques to deal with the stress you are currently feeling is a healthier answer for the time being because finding a job that isn't at all demanding is a big problem.
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