Commonsense About Stress

There is no such thing as a 'pressure free' job. Some pressures can, in fact be a good thing, but people's ability to deal with pressure is not limitless. 

Excessive workplace pressure and the stress to which it may lead can be harmful; they can damage your performance and undermine health and well being. The aim of blog is to help you understand how this can happen and what you can do to prevent it.

Eliminating pressure from work may not be possible or desirable but controlling harmful and unnecessary levels of stress will help keep you fit and healthy and enable the organisation to achieve its goals.

The articles i will be posting will help you quickly get to grips with unwanted physical, emotional and psychological reactions and begin to take charge of how you want your work and life to be. It aims to encourage and support you to get involved in learning and using the best and most suitable ideas and techniques  to help you deal with pressure, stress, causes, effects and remedies.

We can make good use of the idea that laughter is the best medicine and encourage you to ask yourself “What do I really want ?” and “Do I work to live or live to work ?” or “”Working to earn a living or failing to enjoy your life ?” Work related stress has reached a new peak and is estimated to cost the world economy
£7bn a year. But what about the costs to the workers and employers? The Institute of Management has estimated that everyday more than a quarter of a million people take time off work because of work-related stress.

We are all being forced to compete on a changing playing field and to produce better results with less, so the pressure increases and falls on the battered and weary shoulders of those still left in the organisations who are under mounting pressure to manage costs more stringently, with staff kept to a minimum, and so staff are
expected to produce at super human rates.According to a recent survey released by the Institute of Personnel and Development 69% of us work when we feel ill, and 42% of us claim that we have “So much work, we don’t have time to fetch a drink or a sandwich.”

American organisations are beginning to take greater care of their workers, not necessarily out of a wave of ‘empathy, warmth and genuineness’ but because of the costs of people falling ill due to overwork. British organisations, ever conscious of what their American counterparts are doing, are becoming more aware of the issues as employers’ liability rises and employees become less reticent about suing.

Staying in good all round ‘shape’ to consistently perform well at work is now critical for everyone involved in organisational success. A critical issue is how to find the right balance between the level of challenge and the level of support in life and work – that optimal level of stress which enables us to create the maximum personal and work effectiveness.

Stress is not to be confused with hard work, pressure, high levels of effort and activity. Stress is not the same because it usually involves a loss or perceived lack of control. In this sense there is no such thing as positive stress because stress is an unwanted and unpleasant state where lack of control is a main cause.

A healthy organisation can be defined as, “Having financial success – cost effectiveness, and a healthy workforce able to maintain performance over time, particularly through periods of change and ‘market’ turbulence.”