Workplace Stress

Workplace stress is a term everyone talks about, but one can hardly find someone who can handle it. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s very common to be tangled in this web and feel fidgety, indignant, and disorientated. Undoubtedly, everyone tries their best in this competitive world — experiencing the pressure of meeting deadlines, angry colleagues, or fulfilling a challenging obligation is not easy. Initially, we don’t even realize how deep our stress is. By the time we realize its gravity, it’s too late to overcome that stress, which starts affecting our physical and mental health.

Unfortunately, it is hard to accept that we cannot always dodge the stress at our workplace, but some ways can lessen it to some extent where its effects are negligible. So, the question arises, what are the sources of stress? How can we overcome or tackle it?

What are the sources of stress?

Firstly, it’s better to know the signs and symptoms of workplace stress and where it comes from.

There can be many reasons for stress. They occur in the form of physical, psychological, and behavioral stress.

Physical symptoms:

• Fatigue, stiffness in muscles
• Headaches
• Heart palpitations
• Sleeping difficulties, such as insomnia
• Gastrointestinal upsets
• Dermatological disorders

Psychological symptoms:

• Depression, anxiety, and discouragement
• Irritability, feelings of being overwhelmed and unable to cope
• Pessimism
• Cognitive difficulties, difficulty in concentration, and decision making

Behavioral symptoms:

• Reduced productivity at work
• Issues with inter-colleague and interpersonal relationship
• Aggression, feeling sick
• Mood swings and irritability
• Less tolerance for frustration and impatience

Those mentioned above are some common symptoms that everyone might be experiencing in their day-to-day life, and these are so common that many don’t even realize that this is just a trailer of the bigger picture.

How can you manage work stress?

Now, it’s time to understand how we can eliminate or lessen workplace stress.

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There are some ways, as discussed below:

• Yoga: We’ve all heard about yoga and how it is a boon in our lives. Many therapeutic yoga poses and techniques are published and written about. But some helpful yoga poses with their benefits in stress relief are as follows:

1. Standing forward bend: In this, you bend yourself forward while exhaling out and try to put your head in between your knees and, simultaneously, stretch your back till you are comfortable enough. Be in this posture for 5–6 breaths, slowly inhale and stretch your arms while straightening your torso back to the same position. Doing this stretches your body and helps you with stress, fatigue, and mild depression.
2. Easy Pose: Sit straight and extend your legs, then cross them so that the feet are placed under opposite knees. Your head, neck, and spine should align enough that your weight is balanced. Close your eyes and start inhaling and exhaling slowly while relaxing your body. Stay in the same position for approximately a minute, and then open your eyes slowly and straighten your legs. This pose helps you physically and mentally by relaxing your spine and whole pose.
3. Relaxation Tricks: This technique helps you physiologically. For instance, keep relaxing the muscles to lower stress and anxiety. In this scenario, sit calmly wherever you are, close your eyes, and relax. Then think of your stress, hold it for 10 seconds and then release it for 20 seconds. Meanwhile, breathe slowly and keep on relaxing. Keep on practicing this till you perfect it. As they say, “Practice makes a man perfect,” and with time, you can kick out all your stress like this.
4. Retrospection of negative thoughts: Thinking about negative thoughts is good, but overthinking them is wrong. It can lead to many mental issues. Most thoughts come into our minds, like, “If I don’t do XYZ, then something bad will happen.” It is a human tendency to first think negatively before we notice the positives. This is good because, in this way, we can prepare ourselves beforehand, but overthinking can be harmful. So, rather than considering it as the only possibility, we should consider other methods and adopt a positive approach. It is a universal truth that “The more we think of something, eventually, it will come to us.” So, keeping a positive rather than a negative mindset is always better.

• Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment instead of the past. Keeping yourself trapped in worries of the past or the future will pile up more and more problems on your plate, which can aggravate your stress levels. This would further put you in serious jeopardy. So, it’s time to live in the present; after all, the present is a “gift to humankind, that’s why we call it present.”
• Problem-Solving: Problem-solving is a technique in which a problem should be divided into smaller pieces and step by step brainstorm for potential solutions, looking for different paths towards each step and testing each possibility. That will no doubt lighten the burden of the problem and decrease the time taken towards the problem, altogether “well well!” zero stress.

All in all, stress is very common in today’s workspace, it can originate from many places, and many reasons could be behind it. But in the end, it’s up to us how we handle it and how we can fight it. We have only discussed some positive approaches out of many. I hope these points will help you handle your stress and bring peace and positivity.

Written by: Navdeep Singh Chauhan, Deputy Android Developer