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Coping with Workplace Stress, There is Hope!Coping with workplace stress is possible for you. Welcome to our website! We are glad you have come. We hope you find the answers here you need in coping with workplace stress in your life or the life of a loved one. First you need to know that you deserve an employment situation free of unnecessary and life damaging stress and hardship. When we speak of stress, we assume it is unnecessary and life-damaging stress beyond your personal threshold. If your loved one or you are, feeling overwhelmed and completely at a loss for how to cope with your workplace as it relates to your world, there is an answer, and we will find it. To help us understand our solution, and thus our choices, we need to understand our problem. To kill the enemy, you need to identify them, and do that we will! The workplace should be a place of constructive production, not an arena for emotional predation. The first step in coping with workplace stress is to look back at the history of this stress and quantify you feelings at each turn of events. Does your stress actually originate in the workplace or is it outside of the workplace environment? Think about it! You could have the stressors actually at home, and at your workplace may be where you would feel it. How is your stress level presently? Has the job responsibilities and setting always been this stressful? On the other hand, has there been a recent change in workload or supervisor to make you seek help in recent days? Could a recent change in management or your job description be part of the source of stress? Was your job once stable, now beginning to change and become less stable than before? When your stress did become uncomfortable, what if any events may have caused it to go to the intolerable level? By sometimes looking at the history of our stress, we can identify specific sources of it, as they become part of our lives. We can now see for ourselves how long we have had this problem, and see if it is unique to this employer or may be a problem within ourselves with several employers involved in our past work history. Once we get a time line on the history of the workplace stress, and the point where it went critical, we can look at things a little deeper. It can be possible that our industry is changing due to stiffer competition, and changes in the technology, which is putting demands on us not present years ago. Gradual changes are much harder to detect, and over time can cause us to build up stress without even realizing it. The next step is to work on identifying our stressors. This is slightly different from looking at the history of our stress and relating it to events or personalities, which may have caused it overall. The reason it is different is this. If our supervisor or manager is a big cause of our discomfort, and our stress problem has been present with many supervisors or managers over several employers, then the manager is not the cause of our stress. The line of work we are in or something within ourselves is the cause, not this supervisor. If on the other hand, the supervisor took over managing the department the same time your stress began then he could be the problem. To better identify our workplace stressors, we will look for them in several different areas. We will do that to give us a better feel of control over our lives. By breaking our work life down into sections, we can better understand our relationship to our stressors, and make the corrections. Stressors can come from the workload and tasks. We choose our jobs because of an organic joy we like to do either to help others, or create something. However over time and as our employment changes, the tasks can lose their meaning, or an inappreciative employer can soon rob us of our joy in our work. The workplace should be a place of satisfaction and social nurturement, as well as a place of economic activity. Responding to economic need, or capitalizing on an opportunity to load up a too-cooperative worker, an employer can overwhelm one with too much work, and the worker not have enough time in their shift to do it all. There should be much work to keep an employee busy and challenged, but not continuously so much work that they never get it caught up. Employees welcome a challenge sometimes because it gives them a well-deserved feather in their cap if by completing it they can pull it off. It also gives them the internal message that they are valued, if only in their own mind. People love to do a good job, without that opportunity, we soon lose heart, and everything becomes boring. Having too much work too often, with little control over gaining the upper hand is definitely a workplace stressor that few personalities can take for very long. After a while, the employee’s self-esteem will fall off as they wonder if they are good enough or worthy, if they cannot handle it. This is especially true of older employees who may feel outdated and unable to keep up with the new technology of today’s workplace. One Possible Answer Look and see how the others within your department are doing it. If they can handle the workload, they must have a system, copy their system if possible to adjust. If the workload is more than it used to be, then seek a lateral transfer to another desk, and push for newer lesser senior employees to pick up the slack. You started at the bottom, so too should the new hires take the heavier workload as you did. You paid your dues to get into the inner circle, so too can they start at the bottom. They deserve to prove their worth to the company as you have. If they cannot handle the workplace stress, then it is they, and not you who should be under the gun. That is only fair. Cashing in on seniority is your right of passage and you should have the first chance at higher positions. If management does not respect seniority, then you can accept those terms, or you can look for another employer who does respect his or her employees. No matter what line of work you are in, there is competition among all employers for the best employee. If you make yourself a top-flight worker, you can get the stress-manageable work place you need from another employer somewhere. Stressors can come from the personalities of management or coworkers. The greatest source of stress is in the mind games in the work place by predatory personalities. As human beings, we relate to our environment always on two levels. The first is the physical level or materially, and the second level is the emotional or spiritual level. We choose our work place not only for financial reasons, but also for emotional reasons as well. These emotional reasons are in fact the greatest reason we choose an employer. Hostile and poisoning personalities, eager to exploit their tactical advantage of being the superior, often abuse and humiliate lesser-powered workers to act out their own hatreds. Peer aggression is also common as a coworker will humiliate or dominate another, getting them to do some of their own work or take blame for some shortcoming. Oftentimes the aggressive peer will have the approval or support from management, giving the lesser employee no options for help. What is unusual about the emotional abuse common in the workplace is that the abuser has the cooperation of the abuse victim. Emotionally abused as children, we grow into adults who seek out non-intimate and poisoning settings to live out our lives, in employment and in relationships, which directly mirrors the intimacy level of our homes as children. Coping with workplace stress may not be the only thing we are coping with, as we seek out an employment setting that duplicates settings we had with our abusive parents. There is a little known truth in higher psychology, which states that ‘in any social group, the intimacy, and authenticity level of that group will only be as intimate or authentic as the highest dominating personality.’ What that means is that your workplace will only be as nurturing as the boss will allow. If you have a boss who plays favorites, entertains political agendas, allows emotional abuse with shame and intimidation, and does not respect personhood boundaries, then you cannot change it. Even if two or more nurturing persons work there, they cannot be any closer or nurturing to each other than the social medium the boss’s personality allows. Once the boss established the dominant vibration, nothing outside of a change in ownership will change it. One possible Answer Look at this situation in your life as a prompting from God to better yourself. In this case, you can live with the emotionally negative and barren landscape of the workplace, or you can leave. There is very little you can do to make this workplace less stressful. If you try to revolt against the emotional standards the management has put in place, management will exile you from the group and eventually fire you in their time and on their terms. Those above you will see you as a threat, not a problem solver. Management will see your attempts to reduce stress for you and others as insubordination and disobedience. Negative managements are usually secretive, vindictive and can be very calculating in their reprisals against what they will see you as, and that is a 'threat.’ That is not a bad thing, because you do have choices. Oftentimes people try to ‘fix a car not worth fixing’ when you can replace it with another better vehicle. Your best choice here is to look elsewhere for employment. The building negativity and stress from hostile persons in you work place may be a sign from God that he has something better for you. Perhaps your time there is gone, and you have done the good there God has sent you there to do, or you have learned the lessons He sent you there to learn. The answer to this question lies in how you feel about the management. Do you trust them to want to change things that are causing stress for you and others, or do you feel that they want those stressors there for their power and control. Go by your gut feeling about trust for your employer. That trust or lack of it will be the key to ‘do you go or do you stay.’ Stressors can come from worries and insecurity about our workplace and our future. For us workers in our later fifties, a big source of stress is fear that we cannot keep up with the pace of life as we age. Even though our present work setting is adequate, and we are managing to meet our deadlines, we still fear that next change which might be just over the horizon. We may see younger employees arrive in the office, and we may hear of talk of a buyout or merger, and we wonder what the new company policy might be on us sex offenders, older workers, or if they might cut our office and contract out our duties. Since Nine Eleven, we do not have to look far to see evidence of change in the economy that has plant closings, buyouts, mergers, and restructurings changing many industries. Nine Eleven was responsible for very little of it, however it was building in the economic world long before that, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and precipitated the cave in. This situation has left businesses scrambling to establish themselves, also has left employees scrambling to stay relevant in their company’s future. One possible Answer Trying to prepare for the next change in life to protect ourselves from it is always a losing situation. No amount of preparation will ever be enough to anticipate and prevent all the eventualities that could happen to you. You will literally worry yourself to death by doing so. The best emotional posture is to do the best you can in the present day, and make reasonable preparation for other employment if your current livelihood fails, and then trust God to guide you in the case of change, beyond that. Stay within your finite boundaries as a simple human being. If you strive too far into the realm of life and try to do that which God controls (and therefore has responsibility), that will just exhaust you in worry. God always speaks to you through your childhood dreams and your talents. His promptings will lead you through the minefields of bad luck in life to a safe haven, but you must trust Him and more importantly, you must trust yourself. Stressors can come from fear of change, as we get older. Oftentimes our job may be adequate, and our co-workers very supportive. However, we may see new equipment arrive in our professions for which we feel inadequate. Computers and automated equipment are changing the way we accomplish everything, and we may fear automated consoles may replace us at work. These fears seem well founded when we see them happen to those all around us in our community. Another phenomenon we may fear is the ‘de-skilling’ of our jobs. Oil riggers who used to make 25.00 an hour in the Gulf of Mexico are now making 12.00 an hour and management is now filling those positions with entry-level young people, training them on the job under harsh conditions. One possible Answer Change happens in the work world. It is not all bad, for it shows us the miracle of our capitalist system of economy, and it is much more good than bad. If your job is at risk of undergoing change, then look for the next place for you. If you will look back at your own career, you will see a gradual progression up the ladder in status and in income. This is the natural flow of things in your life. The places you first started work as a teenager probably do not pay what you made then dollar-value wise for those jobs have changed over time. The middle level jobs you worked at in earlier adult years probably do not pay today what you made then either. It will follow that if your present employment will be outdated, God will lead you to a better place for you, as a natural flow of your life as well. This we call ‘Synchronicity’. If it worked earlier in the majority of your adult life, why should it quit working now? The answer is it will work just fine for you if you trust it to, and it will! Stressors can come from unmet needs at home in our personal lives. When we go to work, we do not go as machines and robots; we go as needful human beings. We need money from our work, but more than that, we need and expect nurturement. If we do not get our selfish nurturement needs met at home then we carry that expectation of nurturement to our work to get those needs met there. Workers with emotionally rich and full lives at home do not need as much nurturement from work as do single workers who lead lives that are more isolated. Coping with workplace stress is harder for a single younger person than for an older emotionally established married person. Unmet expectations from employment for friendship, approval, and social acceptance are a big source of stress if the setting is not nurturing enough. Larger companies are less intimate and recognizing of an individual than smaller companies may be. There are emerging management styles like those utilized by the largest of corporations, which allow little emotional interaction between employees in the belief that it impairs task performance and accuracy. In some cases, these companies do not allow the individual to express their personality in any form, even to the point of denying an employee to put personal articles in their work area, or desk at all! Many companies prohibit marriage between employees in the mistaken belief that it encourages coercion against the company. One possible Answer If you are single and your identity comes from your career, then stress you feel in your work may come from unmet emotional needs. It is not your employment’s responsibility to meet your emotional needs. You are responsible to meet your own personal needs outside of work. You cannot expect a customer or a coworker to thank you for doing what your employer is paying you to do as a job responsibility. It is okay to make your life your work, if it is your passion, there is nothing wrong with that. Nevertheless, in the employment relationship, what you do establishes your value, not who you are. The correction for this malady is a simple one; you have been looking to only one well to provide you water. If you will relax and think about what your emotional needs are, and not where the source should be, the answers will come. Honestly feeling your needs is a very healing and empowering thing. If you are seeking a spouse or best friend, focus on that need. As you go through your daily life with that need in the forefront of your heart, you will gradually go to the source to meet that need. It may come from a work setting, or a new social setting to which you will go. More often than not, it will come from somewhere you least expect it. Looking to only one place is our way of trying to control the circumstances of our life, and that is outside of our boundaries into God’s domain. Coping with workplace stress may mean looking at our lives to see if we are attempting to do something, which God should be doing for us, if we would let him. In this web page, we have looked at stress at our work in the higher context of our spiritual journey. We can also look at more remedies that are environmental. These would include such things as are we getting enough exercise, as in the case of office work. Are we getting enough sleep, if we are taking our work home with us? Is our diet varied and healthy? Are we getting enough water, and are we drinking too much coffee and alcohol? Do we have enough relaxing time doing the recreation we love to do away from our work? We might call this ‘me time.’ We hope you have enjoyed this reading and we hope you have found some answers to this life-poisoning problem. In Coping with workplace stress, we need to look at the causes of it. We need to ask ourselves, ‘Is it an environmental mistake we are making, or is it a spiritual indicator of something deeper God may be trying to tell us?’ Nothing happens by accident, if we take responsibility to solve the problem God gave us, the answer will come. God bless you as you begin your new life today. We would love to hear from you at depress15@depression-and-anxiety-recovery.com. Please tell us how you are doing in your search for answers, and to share your trials and victories with us! We promise to answer every Email. For help with coping with workplace stress, self-esteem and emotional healing issues, please go to our Books and Articles page. Check out our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. This comprehensive book on emotional recovery takes us through our spiritual journey back home to our Original Self. It specifically addresses dealing with stress as well as emotional abuse and relationship issues, and God's intended lessons behind it. This is the ultimate book on your type of situation. Shayne and Lori North
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