3 Powerful Ways To Manage Stress At Work

Stress is an emotional response like all emotional responses, it emerges from the functioning of the motivational system.

Simply put, when you succeed at your goals, you feel good, and when you don't succeed you feel bad. Stress is a negative emotion, so the first thing we can see about stress is that it reflects a goal you are not currently achieving.

Once you understand how stress works, you can begin to take steps to deal with it so it doesn’t become a long-term problem:

1. Figure out what you’re avoiding.

You may discover that the issues at the root of your stress are not important enough to warrant the level of stress they cause.

2. Reframe the situation.

What do you really want to achieve? When you find your stress levels climbing too high, and you can't reframe the situation, then you need to remove the energy driving the feelings of stress.

3. Learn to calm yourself.

The mindfulness meditation techniques that have become so popular can help you to find the objects driving your stress, but they are also good at helping you to diffuse some of the arousal driving the stress response.

Ultimately, stress involves some object in the world that engage your avoidance motivation and gives that system some energy. Always remember as Maureen Killoran once said, “Stress is not what happens to us. It is our response to what happens, and response is something we can choose.” 

Over to you

How do you overcome work stress? Why does work stress you out? How do you rid yourself of overwhelming work stress, without changing your job or career? Can work stress make you physically sick? Share your opinion and thoughts in the comments below.