How To Handle Stress In The Workplace

After working with executives and professionals worldwide, I have seen stress in the workplace mainly caused by what I call “double-binds”.  A double-bind is when going left or going right both cause pain. That is, many professionals in my coaching sessions note that they feel “stuck” in many of the performance-oriented plans that they are embedded inside.

Either there is a rule mandating something or an incentive manipulating them; they either feel controlled or their heart not fulfilled. The controlling sticks and carrots do not satisfy them in a sustainable manner and, at times, even compromise their character and virtuous behavior.

Even though executives often rationalize that they are “just fine”, the stress within them usually stays there and festers when they do not feel free to choose. With the economy in a highly perilous place, fear-driven decision making has replaced transformationally minded ones and has had a ripple effect from the board room down to the mailroom.

The importance of learning how to handle stress in the workplace is growing more and more relevant. Check out some of these alarming national statistics from the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace:

• 40% of job turnover is due to stress.
  
  
• Healthcare expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.
  
  
• Job stress is the source of more health complaints than financial or family problems.
  
  
• Replacing an average employee costs 120%-200% of the salary of the position affected.
  
  
• The average cost of absenteeism in a large company is more than $3.6 million/year.
  
  
• Depression is the largest single predictor of absenteeism and work related performance.
  
  
• Depressive illness, a common side effect of job stress in employees, is associated with nearly 10 annual sick days (this study included one large firm).
  
  
• For every 47 cents spent on treating depression, another 53 cents is indirectly spent on absenteeism, presenteeism, and disability.
  
  
• Insurance data indicates insurance claims for stress related industrial accidents cost nearly twice as much as non stress related industrial accidents.

One of the common suggestions I give my clients on how to handle stress is to first help them get a handle on the viscera effects of stress in their lives. This is important because chronic stress has been normalized in our modern society and getting someone to change something that the body has habituated to is like getting a fish to notice the water.

Especially since the research on changing behavior in life and death situations is nowhere near what we would rationally think–that is, we have a 9 to 1 odds against us that even in such dire straits we will change our behavior (Deutschman, 2005)–one has to be realistic here on any “help” one gives.

Knowing the reality of the landscape of change first allows people to decide if they are really having problems with stress and are asking for help, or if they are intellectually curious about managing stress. This latter group of people is difficult to help because they don’t really have any intention to change or they are quietly thriving on the chaos in their life. However, for those in the former group, I would advise to first step back and assess the situation from an “out of the water” position.

Seek a coach to do an executive retreat and get new perspectives on your life and work. Getting “trite work-life balance” tips without viscerally experiencing and sensing what the body is craving – a coming down of the heightened autonomic nervous system – is madness.  It will not stick.

Stepping back and getting exercise is a wonderfully natural way to give the brain and body what it craves when under an attack of stress. Exercise helps to grow brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) to combat high cortisol levels. Long hours and a double-blinded life are temporarily washed away with the production of BDNF in the brain. This will help protect the eroding of the hippocampus in the brain, where a lot of our primary learning, execution and memory functions work out of.

Furthermore, building better boundaries, delegating, and prioritizing is the way to go. Saying “no” more often and delegating more actively combats the irrational fears we have around the notion to “perform at all costs for it will get me what I want”. For without saying “no”, you will find out that you are indeed practicing a hard-wired path to getting what you want at an insidious cost–a slow demise of functioning that could cost you more than you think.