Strategies For Managing Stress

Strategies for Managing Stress

Every day people describe their lives as intense and stressful. There are many causes of stress such as job related, family, and financial. However, there exist multiple types of stress. Nonetheless, stress levels can vary from one individual to the next and remains to be a challenge definitively. According to Colella, Hitt, and Miller (2006) "stress can be defined as a feeling of tension that occurs when a person assesses that a given situation is about to exceed his or her ability to cope and consequently will endanger his or her well-being." Stress is more common today than it ever has been before in our society (Wallace, 2007). Stress is more common to discuss and people are complaining more and more often about stress. As a result, many people are looking for help and strategies for managing stress. The idea that stress is related to an individual's perception is an important one and forms the basis for many stress management techniques (Wallace, 2007). The goal is to compile a list of strategies for managing stress. Since individuals experience a variety of sources of stress, they should have multiple strategies for dealing with stress management. Having different strategies allows a person to be versatile in matching the response to the type of stress they are experiencing.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health more than half of employed Americans believe that job stress is a major problem in their lives (Koesten, 2005). The American Stress Institute reported that stress is America's number one health problem, costing the economy more than 300 billion a year in absenteeism, turnover, lost productivity, and insurance claims (Koesten, 2005). Better communication with associates at work can help manage stress more effectively. For example, the Ð''ask don't tell' rule describes "when you are tempted to tell people what action they should take, stop and ask for their ideas about how to proceed (Ð''How do you think we should do this?' or Ð''What ideas do you have about how we could do this most efficiently') (Anonymous, 2007)? Since people are usually afraid of changes, it's important to reassure them that it's acceptable to make some mistakes during the learning process. Managers need to communicate that we learn from mistakes and to help each other learn, and how they can use it to improve their work environment. In addition, the J Curve model states:

when individuals go through the process of change, their performance often starts as a relatively high level (Stage 1). When a major change in policy and practices occurs, individual and organizational performance can drop precipitously (Stage 2). Next, the performance drop levels out, but it is far below where we were and where we want to be (Stage 3). As people learn how to function in the new system, performance begins to improve dramatically (Stage 4). Finally, performance surges above the level at which we started (Stage 5) (Anonymous, 2007).

A regular pattern of ideas and emotions are associated with each of these stages. At stage 1, fear is an emotion that occurs and doubt that change will be a success. Getting people over that emotional cliff between stages 1 and 2 is the toughest challenge. When performance drops in stage 2, people will have a strong urge to return to their old ways of doing things because they feel the new way will never work. Stage 3 is the toughest challenge for managers in motivating people to keep on working the new approach despite the lack of progress. When the performance curve starts to rise in stage 4, people start to gain confidence in the new way of doing things and it produces confidence in management. In stage 5, the new way becomes the only way to do things (Anonymous, 2007). Using the J curve model allows manager to communicate better and minimize the distraction associates with stress and changes in the workplace.

Another type of strategy for managing stress at the workplace is to decrease or discontinue caffeine. Most people don't think of coffee, cola or chocolate as a powerful drug that generates a stress reaction in the body (Harig, 2005). The best way to observe the effect of caffeine is to get it out of one's system long enough to determine if there is a difference in how the individual feels. In most cases, three weeks is enough time to tell the difference on how you feel. Based on research data 75 to 80 percent of people notice a benefit, they feel more relaxed, less jittery or nervous, sleep better, and have more energy, less heartburn and fewer muscle aches (Harig, 2005). However, medical evidence indicates that one must proceed with caution when weaning from caffeine. "You must wean yourself slowly or you will get migraine type headaches from caffeine withdrawal (Harig, 2005)." Additional research recommends that an individual should decrease his or her caffeine intake to one drink per day until he or she reaches zero, then abstain for three weeks (Harig, 2005).

Realistic expectations are also known as an additional strategy for managing stress in the workplace. In this approach, people often become upset about something because it does not concur with what they expected (Harig, 2005). For instance, slow-moving traffic during rush hour, you expect heavy traffic but will not be upset about it. However, if it