These Three Bad Habits Are Making Your Work Stress
Worse
Finding alone time to chip away at a stressful problem might actually be
counterproductive.
There are plenty of workplace stressors you can neither avoid
nor minimize–you’ve just got to deal with them. Maybe
your performance review is around the corner and you’re worried you won’t
meet expectations. Perhaps you’ve just been criticized
by your supervisor or a colleague and are anxious to get back on your
game. Or possibly it’s that the project you’re managing is destined to go
over budget.
These experiences can be stressful in their own right, but
sometimes people create more stress than a situation requires. Research going
back some 100 years, on the so-called Yerkes-Dodson curve, finds that most people have a “sweet spot” in terms of stress, or what
psychologists refer to as “arousal.” Too little, and you won’t be able to
generate enough energy or motivation to work. Too much, and you’ll crumple
under the pressure, unable to focus on the task at hand.
So when you’re laboring under a certain degree of unavoidable
stress, you need to make sure it’s the right amount to keep you plugging away,
but not so overwhelming that your performance and productivity plummet. To keep
things in balance, try kicking these three common habits people fall into when
coping with work stress.
MISTAKE #1: TRYING TO GO IT ALONE
One side effect of stress it that it can sap your focus. You tend
to get stuck in a cycle of thinking, called “rumination,” about the thing
that’s stressing you out. In addition, since stress is your brain’s and body’s
response to something you deem potentially dangerous, you become
extra sensitive to things going on in your immediate environment (due
to the fact that many of the stressors our evolutionary ancestors faced
involved physical threats, not conceptual ones).
To compensate for these distracting tendencies, many people try to
isolate themselves from other people when they’re under pressure. “If only I
can get a few hours alone this week to really focus, I’ll be able to get a
better handle on this,” you may think. But this habit might only make
things worse. In fact, one way to help yourself get productive work done
while you’re stressed is to work together in a group.
After all, another psychologically hardwired lesson from
humans’ evolutionary past was safety in numbers. When we’re feeling
threatened, we gravitate toward teams. Your brain will likely be able to
stay more focused in stressful situations when you’re working
with others than when you try to hack away at a problem on your own–that is,
just as long as you don’t spend the whole time talking about whatever’s
stressing you out.
MISTAKE #2: SACRIFICING YOUR DOWNTIME
Depending on the root cause, some stressful situations unfold over
long periods of time–a few days, a couple weeks, even the better part of a
year. If you work for a company that’s struggling to survive, you may see
no end in sight to the high-pressure environment you’re working within. In
cases like these, you need to find ways to escape at least for a while.
Unfortunately, many people’s first reaction is to do the reverse–cutting back
on personal time in order to slog through a tough situation.
Remember, stress isn’t just a response to what’s already going on
around you–it’s also your reaction to negative things that might happen
but haven’t yet. So it’s important not to sacrifice the habits and routines
that sustain you over the long haul. And somewhat counterintuitively, one
solution is to do things that lessen work-related stress in the
near-term. Yoga and mindfulness exercises are common ways to create a
sense of peace and serenity. No, they won’t eliminate your dread of what might
still be on the horizon, but they can dampen the arousal that’s getting
the best of you right now.
The other alternative is just to find something truly enjoyable to
do, whether or not it induces calm or mindfulness. Go to a movie or
concert. Play a game. Do some exercise. In this case, you’re focusing your
motivation on something desirable, rather than something stressful. The
motivation to do pleasant things competes with the motivation
to avoid negative ones. So if you can immerse yourself in positive
activities, you’ll shift your motivation away from the focus on the stressors
for a while. This can at lest help you keep stress that you can’t totally
eliminate at manageable levels over long periods.
MISTAKE #3: LOSING PERSPECTIVE
When a big negative outcome feels like it’s right around the
corner, it’s likely that your fear outstrips the potential reality. Stress
causes you to magnify the imagined impact of the event you’re worrying about,
which makes it hard to actually plan for it.
To regain some perspective, force yourself to think through the
worst-case scenario as methodically as you can. For example, if your company
does go bankrupt, what would that actually mean for you within the first week
after it’s announced? The first month? How hard would it be for you to
find another job? Would working somewhere else really be that bad?
When we’re under stress we can’t seem to control or mitigate, we
tend to believe that bad outcomes will be much worse than they typically prove
to be in reality. The researchers Dan Gilbert
and Tim Wilson have found that people regularly
overestimate the long-term impact of negative events. Just telling yourself
that you’re worrying needlessly isn’t likely to de-stress the situation, of
course–you’re going to feel what you’re going to feel.
But to help you manage those feelings, try just
accepting the worst imaginable outcome rather than struggling to avoid it with
everything you’ve got. This way, if it really does come to pass, you may find
yourself more resilient and adaptable than you’d thought.
BY ART MARKMAN
https://www.fastcompany.com/40461960/these-three-bad-habits-are-making-your-work-stress-worse?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=4&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=09052017
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