Managing Stress
Questions
What is stress?
What causes stress?
How can we manage stress?
How can we help others manage stress?
What Is Stress?
...our body’s physical and emotional reaction to
circumstances or events that frighten, irritate,
confuse, endanger, or excite us.
 Surveys and Research Reports over the past two decades
reveal that: 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects due
to stress.
 75-90% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stressrelated complaints or disorders.
 Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death,
including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents,
cirrhosis, and suicide.
 An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average
workday because of stress related complaints.
 Stress is said to be responsible for more than half of the
550,000,000 workdays lost annually because of absenteeism.
 A three-year study conducted by a large corporation showed
that 60% of employee absences were due to psychological
problems such as stress.
 Nearly half of all American workers suffer from symptoms of
burnout, a disabling reaction to stress on the job.
 The proportion of workers who reported "feeling highly
stressed" more than doubled from 1985 to 1990.
 Job stress is estimated to cost US Industry $300 billion
annually, as assessed by absenteeism, diminished
productivity, employee turnover, direct medical, legal and
insurance fees, etc.
 60-80% of industrial accidents are due to stress. Some, like
the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Three Mile Island nuclear
disaster have direct cleanup costs of billions of dollars, not to
mention environmental damage that cannot even be
estimated.
 Workers' compensation awards for job stress, rare two
decades ago, have skyrocketed and threaten to bankrupt the
system in some states.
 California employers shelled out almost $1 billion for
medical and legal fees alone. Nine out of ten job stress suits
are successful, with an average payout more than four times
that for regular injury claims.
 The market for stress management programs, products, and
services was $9.4 billion in 1995, and is projected to be
$11.31 billion for 1999.
 40% of worker turnover is due to job stress. The Xerox
Corporation estimates that it costs approximately $1-$1.5
million to replace a top executive, and average employee
turnover costs between $2,000 to $13,000 per individual.
 Workplace violence is rampant. There are almost 2 million
reported instances of homicide, aggravated assault, rape or
sexual assaults. Homicide is the second leading cause of fatal
occupational injury and the leading cause of death for
working women.
The Work Underload -Overload
Continuum
Optimal
Stress
Work
Underload
Moderate
Work Load
Work
Overload
What Causes Stress?
People
 Self expectations
 Impersonal barriers
 Conflicting desires
Situations
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Expectations
Time
Lack of resources
Lack of vision & goals
Environmental Stresses
Here your environment may be a source of
unpleasant or distracting stimuli. These can
come from:
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Crowding and invasion of personal space
Insufficient working and living space
Noise
Dirty or untidy conditions
Pollution
A badly organized or run down environment
Chemical & Nutritional
Stresses
Here the food you eat may contribute to the stresses
you experience.
 Caffeine: this raises your levels of stress hormones, makes
it more difficult to sleep, and can make you more irritable.
 Bursts of sugar from sweets or chocolate: these can make
you feel more energetic in the short term. However you
body reacts to stabilize abnormally high sugar levels by
releasing too much insulin. This causes a serious energy
dip shortly after the sugar high.
 Too much salt: This raises your blood pressure and puts
your body under chemical stress.
Chemical and Nutritional stresses
cont.
These specific sources of stress, you may experience
stress if you eat an unbalanced or unhealthy diet.
You may find that some dietary deficiency or excess
causes physical stress on your internal organs and
emotional stress as your view of yourself declines.
While there is a lot of biased, dubious or incorrect
dietary information around, you can normally rely on
your nutritional advice from your doctor or from
your government’s health department.
Lifestyle & Job
Stresses
Many stresses you experience may come from your
job or from your lifestyle. These may include:
 Too much or too little work
 Having to perform beyond your experience or perceived
abilities
 Having to overcome unnecessary obstacles
 Time pressures and deadlines
 Keeping up with new developments
 Changes in procedures and policies
 Lack of relevant infromation, support and advice
Lifestyle cont.
 Lack of clear objectives
 Unclear expectations of your role from your boss or
colleagues
 Responsibility for people, budgets, or equipment
 Career development stress:
Under-promotion, frustration, and boredom with current role
Over-promotion beyond abilities
Lack of a clear plan for career development
Lack of opportunity
Lack of job security
Life styles cont.
 Stress form your organization or your clients:
Pressures from you boss or from above in you organization
Interference in you work
Demands from clients
Disruptions to work plans
The telephone
 Personal and family stresses:
Financial problems
Relationship problems
Ill-health
Family changes such as birth, death, marriage, or divorce
Stages of Reaction to Stress
 Alarm: the individual becomes of
aware of the stressor.
 Resistance: the individual
attempts to fight off and/or adapt
to the stressor.
 Exhaustion: the costs of fighting
and/or adaptation are so high the
individual wears out.
Burnout
Burnout is a specific stress-related
psychological consequence. It has three
dimensions:
 Emotional exhaustion
 Depersonalization
 Reduced sense of personal accomplishment
Objective 5.3
Describe the effects of stress
 Stress sets off an alarm reaction in the body.
 The bodies fight or flight mechanism starts to function.
 During stress or anxiety hormones are released into the
bloodstream.
 These hormones such as adrenalin.
 Adrenalin normally helps the body adjust to sudden
stress.
 When a person becomes angry or frightened, the adrenal
glands release large amounts of adrenalin into the blood.
 The hormone causes changes in the body to make it more
efficient for "fight or flight."
 For example, adrenalin increases the strength and rate of
the heartbeat and raises the blood pressure.
 The heart and breathing rate may increase to cope with
the demands.
 It also speeds up the conversion of glycogen into glucose,
which provides energy to the muscles.
 Emotional or physical stress may trigger or exaggerate
these disruptions, which weaken the immune system.
 If thing causing the stress is prolonged the bodies ability
to ward off illness may therefore be reduced.
 This helps explain why people who suffer from stress
often are more likely to catch colds, flu and other minor
illnesses.
 The bodies fight or flight mechanism runs into overdrive burning
energy, this may be followed by severe fatigue.
 During the periods of fatigue a person may typically lack the energy
to perform most of their desired daily activities.
 Other common symptoms include pain in the muscles and joints,
headache, mental confusion, depression, anxiety, and irritability.
 It is usually inappropriate to fight or run away from the situation
these days, this and the fact that the anxiety causing situation may
cause the person to have an other reaction to the situation that is to
freeze, and not be able to physically do anything about it.
 All these reactions cause the body to use a lot of energy which result
in a physically and mentally weakened person.
Short Term Physical
Symptoms of Stress
 These mainly occur as your body adapts to perceived physical threat, and
are caused by release of adrenaline. Although you may perceive these as
unpleasant and negative, they are signs that you body is ready for the
explosive action that assists survival or high performance:
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Faster heart beat
Increased sweating
Cool skin
Cold hands and feet
Feeling of nausea, or “butterflies in stomach”
Rapid breathing
Tense muscles
Fry mouth
A desire to urinate
Diarrhea
Long Term Physical
Symptoms of Stress
 Change in appetite
 Frequent colds
 Illnesses such as: asthma, back pain,
digestive problems, headaches, and skin
eruptions
 Sexual disorders
 Aches and pains
 Feelings of intense and long-term tiredness
Short Term Performance
Effects of Stress
 While adrenaline helps you survive in a “fight-or-flight” situation, it does
have negative effects in situations where this is not the case:
 It interferes with clear judgment and makes it difficult to take the time to
make good decisions
 It can seriously reduce your enjoyment of your work
 Where you need good physical skills it gets in the way of fine motor control
 It causes difficult situations to be seen as a threat, not a challenge
 It damages the positive frame of mind you need for high quality work by:
 Promoting negative thinking
 Damaging self-confidence
 Narrowing attention
 Disrupting focus and concentration
 Making it difficult to cope with distractions
 It consumes mental energy in distraction, anxiety, frustration, and temper.
This is energy that should be devoted to the work in hand.
Internal Symptoms of Stress
 Worry or anxiety
 Confusion, and an inability to concentrate or make decisions
 Feeling ill
 Feeling out of control or over whelmed by events
 Mood change: Depression, frustration, hostility, helplessness,
impatience and irritability, restlessness
 Being more lethargic
 Difficulty sleeping
 Drinking more alcohol and smoking more
 Changing eating habits
 Reduced sex drive
 Relying more on medication
Behavioral Symptoms of Stress
Talking too fast or too loud
Yawning
Fiddling and twitching, nail biting, grinding teeth,
drumming fingers, pacing, etc.
Bad moods: being irritable, defensiveness, being
critical, aggression, irrationality, overreaction and
reaction emotionally
Reduced personal effectiveness: being unreasonably
negative, making less realistic judgements, being
unable to concentrate and having difficulty making
decisions, being more forgetful, making more
mistakes, being more accident prone
Changing work habits
Increased absenteeism
Neglect of personal appearance
How Can We Manage Stress?
Keep life in perspective Develop productive work
skills
Exercise
Take time to work
Don’t bottle up things
Take time to play
Set realistic expectations
Learn to relax
Live in the present
Avoid frustrations
Laugh often and loud
Additional Stress Management
Techniques
How Can We Help Others
Manage Stress?
Encourage expression of feelings
Help identify stressors
Relieve pressures
Facilitate adaptation
Summary
We need some stress to perform at peak levels
Help others deal with stress - talk (don’t complain)
Be prepared -- take time to “sharpen the saw”
People and situations cause stress - control both
Avoid frustration
Exercise
Smile
Be around those you like
Enjoy sunsets