Stress

Work stress is an inevitable part of being a professional, but not all types of stress are bad. Good stress results from you working hard to achieve something you find important. Bad stress tends to arise when people are overworked, feel underappreciated, or are having conflicts with their peers. If we are not able to reduce the amount of bad stress we are feeling, our frustration may lead to us triggering a conflict, even if that is not our intention.

When we feel fulfilled, appreciated, and motivated, the work we do will result in good stress. We will push ourselves to do our best work, we will proactively seek out and solve problems, and we will do our best to meet deadlines. At the end of a hard day of work full of good stress, we may be exhausted, but we are looking forward to continuing our work tomorrow.

When we feel overwhelmed by the work assigned to us, that the work we have to do is unfulfilling, and that deadlines are unreasonable, our work will result in bad stress. We will tend to not want to work, any work we do will tend to be of poor quality, and we will all but give up on trying to meet deadlines. At the end of a hard day of work full of bad stress, we may feel depressed, sad, and anxious, and will hate even the thought of returning to work tomorrow.

Beyond the bad stress caused by the work we have to do, if we add to this a toxic work environment, the stress we feel can be unbearable. Toxic work environments tend to result from people not speaking to their peers respectfully, and instead of being diplomatic, their phrasing is passive-aggressive or even aggressive.

For example, in a normal work environment, someone might ask, "Let me know when you're done," whereas in a toxic work environment someone might say, "I can't believe you're not done." Instead of, "If you need any help, ask me and I'll be happy to lend a hand," they might say, "You need to learn to get your work done yourself, because no one is going to help you." Instead of, "We've got a status update meeting right now, are you coming?" they might say, "Great, another useless status meeting."

How we communicate with each other has such a profound effect on our sense of well-being at work, that we should be very careful to only communicate assertively, where our honesty is expressed as directly as we can, but also as diplomatically as we are able. Where this can prove extremely difficult is when the amount of bad stress we feel has left us with no desire to be diplomatic, and instead of communicating respectfully, we tend to lash out at our peers, be sarcastic and insensitive in our responses, or become defensive and angry with hardly any provocation.

As bad stress can reduce our desire to be diplomatic, and communication that is not diplomatic creates or contributes to a toxic work environment, then our goal should be to reduce the bad stress we feel, which has two aspects: reducing external sources of stress, and regulating our reaction to stress.

Though it can sometimes be difficult to believe, the vast majority of organizations would prefer that their employees only feel good stress, and never bad stress. The reason for this is simply a matter of pragmatism: good stress leads to higher productivity, and bad stress leads to lower productivity. Where this can get confusing is the external sources of stress often originate from the organization itself, which can lead someone to conclude that if the source of bad stress is the organization, then the organization must want bad stress, but this could not be further from the truth.

Organizations are made up of people, and people have good days and bad days. Further, the future is unpredictable, resulting in organizations sometimes making the best decision they could based on what they knew at the time, but that ends up negatively affecting people in the future. In other words, companies are flawed and imperfect because people are flawed and imperfect. This results in companies making mistakes, such as assigning too much work, the wrong type of work, or setting unrealistic expectations.

Knowing that imperfection is a natural side effect of any organization, but also knowing that organizations want to increase good stress while decreasing bad stress, you have a lot of bargaining power when it comes to negotiating for bad stress to be converted into good stress.

For example, if you feel overwhelmed with the amount of work you have to do, ask for assistance from your peers, or request that some of your work be reassigned. If you feel that your work is boring, confirm that the work is necessary, and if it is, you might ask for training on tools and techniques that may help you get the work done more quickly. If you feel that a deadline is unreasonable, come up with a plan to either reduce the amount of work to do, increase the number of resources, or request that the deadline be moved.

If all of our external sources of bad stress cannot be eliminated, we can still regulate our own reaction to bad stress. This only requires that we accept a single truth: we are in full control of how we respond to stress, even when we have little to no control over the sources of that stress.

There are many techniques that can be employed to control our reaction to bad stress:

We can breathe deeply and slowly to calm ourselves down.

We can be stoic by using logic and reason to separate the things we can control from the things we cannot, and learn to not worry about things we cannot control.

We can look at situations from different perspectives in order to reframe negative situations into positive situations, in that we choose to look at a glass as being half-full, rather than half-empty.

We can change the way we describe a situation to ourselves, such as by substituting a "yeah but," with an "at least."

Whatever method you choose to reduce your bad stress, be it through reducing external sources of stress, regulating your reaction to stress, or both; our goal is to maintain our desire to communicate diplomatically so as not to create or contribute to a toxic work environment, reducing the chances that we cause or encounter conflicts at work.