Stress In The Workplace

There is no place like the workplace to generate stress. In fact, for most people, stress and work are unfortunately synonymous.

Partly, this is due to our attitude about work. Most of us have grown up with the belief that we have to work, and somehow this belief is loaded with lots of negative attitudes and feelings.

It's like when we were kids and our parents told us we had to get up in the morning to go to school, while what we wanted to do was stay in bed and keep dreaming. Remember all the excuses we came up with? The stomachaches, the "fevers", the coughing spells? Remember how we took forever to put on our socks, to tie our shoelaces, to drink that glass of milk? Remember how we drove our mom crazy with our slowness, our negativity, our resistance? Guess where present day procrastination comes from...

Anyway, this negative attitude towards school that most of us shared, and was very age-appropriate and even gained us peer group acceptance, more often than not has been carried to our maturer years and our relationship with work. Somewhere inside we carry the subconscious notion that work has to be unpleasant, since it's something we have to do, not something we choose to do.

Most people are under the impression that they would be much happier if they didn't have to work for a living. They think that if they didn't have to work, then they would be free to do all the things they would really like to do. The workplace is perceived as prison.

Research, however, has shown that idle people, people that have been "fortunate" enough not to have to work for a living, are not really all that happy, and in fact, are much unhappier than common, ordinary folk like you and me, who "have" to work even in low-income jobs. Why is that?

One reason is that we are equipped with a powerful instrument, our brain, and most importantly with the frontal lobes of our brain which distinguish us from any other mammal on earth. Among other things, the frontal lobes, make us more prone to boredom than any other species alive. Animals do not experience boredom. When they are not hunting, they sleep, period.

In humans, though, boredom begets more boredom and inertia, and inertia begets depression. Actually, we need to work, we need to be productive, not only because we need money to survive, but because our brain requires the kind of stimulation that results from steady, sustained effort, and goal-oriented activity.

Often, the stress we feel at work stems from our conflicted and un-clarified beliefs about work itself. So when we go to work carrying this concealed negative "aura" about us, it's no wonder that others, our superiors, peers, subordinates sense this negative attitude of ours. Not only that, but it also reverberates with their own negative attitude, and negativity can escalate to great proportions.

Bad relationships at work, subtle and covert hostility, passive-aggressive resistance that we create as a result of irrational and childish beliefs about work can produce quite a bit of stress.

Of course, this is just one factor; the phenomenon of stress in the workplace is many-faceted and determined by many more factors. But think of this: stress is a feeling and our feelings are usually a result of our perceptions and interpretations of reality. If we can re-frame our perceptions in a more positive spirit, we can immediately experience better results.