Mind Tools - Effective Stress Management - Environmental & Job Stresses, and Fatigue

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Environmental and Job Stress

You may find that your environment or job are causing you stress. The stress you experience may come from some of the following:

Environmental stresses

Here your environment may be a source of unpleasant or distracting stimuli. These can come from:

Crowding and invasion of personal space
Insufficient working and living space
Noise
Dirty or untidy conditions
Pollution
A badly organised or run down environment

Chemical and nutritional stresses

Here the food you eat may contribute to the stresses you experience. Examples of stressors you may not be aware of are:

Caffeine: this raises your levels of stress hormones, makes it more difficult to sleep, and can make you more irritable.
Bursts of sugar from sweets or chocolate: these can make you feel more energetic in the short term. However your body reacts to stabilise abnormally high sugar levels by releasing too much insulin. This causes a serious energy dip shortly after the sugar high.
Too much salt:This raises your blood pressure and puts your body under chemical stress.

As well as these specific sources of stress, you may experience stress if you eat an unbalanced or unhealthy diet. You may find that some dietary deficiency or excess causes discomfort and illness which generates stress. If you are obese, then this causes physical stress on your internal organs and emotional stress as your view of yourself declines.

While there is a lot of biased, dubious or incorrect dietary information around, you can normally rely on nutritional advice from your doctor or from your government's health department.

Lifestyle and job stress

Many of the stresses you experience may come from your job or from your lifestyle. These may include:

too much or too little work
having to perform beyond your experience or perceived abilities
having to overcome unnecessary obstacles
time pressures and deadlines
keeping up with new developments
changes in procedures and policies
lack of relevant information, support and advice
lack of clear objectives
unclear expectations of your role from your boss or colleagues
responsibility for people, budgets or equipment
career development stress:
- under-promotion, frustration and boredom with current role
- over-promotion beyond abilities
- lack of a clear plan for career development
- lack of opportunity
- lack of job security
Stress from your organisation or your clients:
- pressures from your boss or from above in your organisation
- interference in your work
- demands from clients
- disruptions to work plans
- the telephone!
Personal and family stresses:
- financial problems
- relationship problems
- ill-health
- family changes such as birth, death, marriage or divorce.

Fatigue and Overwork

A particularly unpleasant source of stress comes from what David Lewis calls 'Hurry Sickness'.

Here you can get into a vicious circle of stress, which causes you to hurry jobs and do them badly. This under-performance causes feelings of frustration and failure, which causes more stress, which causes more hurry and less success, and so on. Stress-creating behaviour can compound this, as can an inability to relax at home or on holiday. If you do not manage long term stress effectively, it can lead to long term fatigue, failure and one of the forms of physical or mental ill-health.

Very often you can eliminate this sort of overload by effective use of time management skills, particularly by learning how to prioritise effectively. You can neutralise the associated stress by effective use of stress management techniques.

Highly Recommended Books

For an excellent book on stress management, try The Book of Stress Survival - How to Relax and Live Positively by Alix Kirsta. This is a very pleasant, well-presented, sensible approach to stress management. It covers many important areas completely ignored by most other books.

Internally Generated Stress

How to Recognise Stress

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