Managing stress

Overview
Exercises

Overview

In practice: Using skills and techniques to anticipate and mitigate the impact of stress.

Workplace stress is a big problem – for individuals and for organisations. In 2018-19 over 600,000 workers (nearly 2% of the workforce) in Great Britain were known to suffer from it and 12.8 million working days (just over half of all working days lost due to ill health) were lost due to stress, depression or anxiety. Women have higher rates than men¹.

In its simplest mechanical definition, stress is the consequence of pressure acting on an object. It’s similar for humans. We have evolved over millennia to stay alert for threats – which produces internal stress. It becomes a particular problem for us when the stress becomes too great, or lasts too long. At that point the rational part of our brain shuts down² and emotion and impulses take over.

Stress: good, bad or ugly

Good stress is motivating and prepares us for a challenge. Examples include a new job, a new baby, or planning a holiday. Life without this type of stress would be boring, and create its own problems.

Bad stress comes when the daily load becomes relentless – signs might include losing sleep, headaches and irritability. This overview looks at evidence about what causes workplace stress and how to overcome it.

If this is compounded by lack of control, and no sense of meaning, it can become ugly. At this stage there may be physical and mental problems including high blood pressure, digestive issues and depression or anxiety. Please seek advice here³ about psychological or physical symptoms you are concerned about and how to deal with them. Please do not put that off.

Stress at work

Let’s look in more detail at the most common causes of stress at work, and ways we can deal with them.

Research shows that the two main areas of stress at work are job factors (eg workload, role uncertainty and lack of autonomy) and interpersonal relationships (lack of support from managers, conflict and bullying)⁴. We discuss some ways of dealing with these stresses below.

Sometimes we also inadvertently increase our stress, and feel more disempowered than we need to, by the way we ‘look at things’. There is evidence that ‘self-help’ can really make a difference here so we have included some evidence-based examples and exercises in the ‘Ways of thinking’ section.

Finally, we include a section specifically on tips for team leaders on what to prioritise to reduce stress for your team.

Job factors

The most common sources of ‘job-based’ stress are:

Our workload is too heavy.
We are unclear about what is expected of us.
We haven’t been given enough autonomy to do our work well.
There is not enough challenge or variety in our work.
Our work does not mean much to us or give us a sense of purpose.

A workload that is too heavy causes stress, especially fatigue⁵. If the sheer amount of work you have to get through is causing problems you may find that improving your skill at prioritising will help you to weed out some of your tasks. Check out the page on prioritising for some useful techniques. If you have already tried that, then it is worth having a discussion with your team leader to see if some tasks can be dropped, delayed or handed to someone else.

If that leads nowhere there will probably be organisational processes (eg through HR) that you can turn to for a review of your job description, more support, or a transfer to a different role.

If you have exhausted all these avenues, you may as a last resort consider looking for another job - either as an internal transfer or to another organisation. A US study found “one in two employees have left their job to get away from their manager at some point in their career”⁶.

Interestingly, deadlines are also experienced as pressure but, because they often offer an opportunity to shine, the overall effect of working to tight deadlines turns out often to be a plus for people at work⁷.

Lack of clarity, autonomy and variety should also all be discussable with a good team leader to see if there is potential for making changes. A step-by-step process for resolving such job-based stresses is shown below.

Improving a stressful job:

Try to develop your own skills to resolve the problem.
Ask trusted colleagues for advice.
Ask your manager for advice, help or resources.
See if there are formal organisational processes available to help eg HR.

If 1 – 4 don’t resolve the problem you are left with either continuing in a stressful, un-motivating role or leaving it. Both of these have their costs in terms of your health and wellbeing. The cost of staying in a stressful role is perhaps more hidden than the sheer effort of finding a new job but it may damage your health more in the long run.

How important it is to have a job that gives us a sense of purpose is a more personal matter. Many of us stay in a particular job because it is convenient for many other reasons – eg reasonable pay and a good life outside work – and accept that it isn’t the job of our dreams. For others, doing something that we feel is important is essential to our well-being. If this builds up into a serious dissatisfaction with your current job, again it may be best to look elsewhere.

Interpersonal relationships

Management style

The best supervisors and managers support their team, thank them for a job well done and show that they value their contribution. These managers not only have the happiest teams but get the best out of people⁸.

But what if your boss micro-manages you every step of the way and seems to seek opportunities to undermine your confidence – even criticising you in front of others? There’s a saying that people take a job because of the role and the company but leave it because of their direct manager and it is easy to understand why! Unsupportive managers produce unhappy underperforming teams.

What can you do to reduce the stress of a relationship-based problem with your manager?

The first thing you can consider, if you think the manager might be unaware of the effect of their behaviour, is to discuss your experience with them. Be specific about what works for you if you are going to be able to give your best work and see if you can engage them in a constructive discussion. Do you need more regular feedback on how you are doing, or more time for discussion with them? If you are concerned that their reaction might be unpredictable or punishing you could consider involving a third party (eg HR) in this discussion.

If you think there is no hope of change but you are prepared to continue in your role you need to make sure you are getting support and encouragement from good support networks inside and outside work. Being undermined by your boss, or even having a boss who gives you no real feedback, can have a very destructive impact on your health and well-being⁹ as well as your motivation and performance.

A couple of thoughts to reduce the stress of a difficult relationship with your boss:

Note down at the end of the day five ways in which you know you did good work today, even if it was unappreciated. Doing this will increase your resilience. You can find out more about building up resilience here.
Try to think of ways in which your boss is good. It’s unlikely that they are awful at everything and acknowledging their strong points to yourself may help you to feel calmer about your predicament. Forgiving your manager for not being the manager you deserve may be a good way of retaining your own sense of empowerment.

Finally, if you feel your boss is actually bullying you – eg repeatedly picking on you, putting you down in front of others, overloading you with work – then you need to refer to your organisation’s formal processes. Protection from bullying is enshrined both in law and in employment contracts. The route here is straightforward, if challenging – refer and take advice.

If you think there is no hope of your boss changing their style you may well be best off looking for another job, even if you enjoy your current work.

Relationships

Poor relationships in general (not just with your boss) cause distress at work. Numerous studies have shown that all forms of mistreatment - from a general culture of interpersonal conflict and incivility through to bullying - impact psychological and physical well-being¹⁰ and team performance.

Behaviour to watch out for includes:

Undermining behaviour: talking about people behind their back, spreading rumours, and ignoring or belittling peoples’ ideas.
Incivility: being condescending or derogatory, putting people down.
Interpersonal conflict: people being rude, unpleasant, shouting at and threatening each other.
Bullying: situations where someone repeatedly and over a period of time is exposed to negative acts such as abuse, offensive remarks, teasing, ridicule or social exclusion.

All of these need to be addressed by the team leader as soon as possible. The page on managing challenging behaviour will help you with ways to approach this. ‘Mild’ forms of mistreatment like incivility have been found by research to be every bit as toxic and destructive as bullying.

Inclusion

Discrimination is detrimental to the mental and physical health of people from minority communities, whether it is of an overt, illegal nature like bullying, sexism or racism or so-called ‘subtle discrimination’ such as lack of courtesy or rudeness which is not illegal and may even be unintended¹¹.

Team members can help each other to reduce stress-inducing behaviour by treating everyone with courtesy and respect and encouraging everyone to speak up in meetings. The page on how to be an inclusive team will help you with this.

Ways of thinking

Sometimes our ways of thinking can be our own worst enemies when it comes to generating stress. But the good news is that these are often very amenable to self-help techniques. Here are two common pitfalls we fall into – and ways of dealing with them.

A wandering mind

Left to its own devices, our mind keeps itself busy – it ‘wanders’ nearly 50% of the time¹². Unfortunately, this default mode tends towards the inward and the negative. In the words of one research paper “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.

Unhappy thoughts might be either rumination (repetitive thoughts about the past) or worry (uncertainty and anxiety about the future). And in the present moment, one estimate is that the average person’s bucket list includes 150 undone tasks¹³. These can function like open files on a computer and drain energy, with no useful effect.

Turning our attention inwards, as in many traditional meditation techniques, might draw a person who is already stressed further into the default mind-wandering mode. The Mayo Clinic recommendation therefore is to become more conscious of focusing attention externally, and to make the quality of that attention both joyful and kind. You can see a mindfulness exercise with an external focus here. You can also find links to other good mindfulness resources on the Exercises tab.

Cognitive distortion

Research suggests that about 40 per cent of our variation in happiness comes from our own intentional actions (the rest is genetics and environment)¹⁴.

A core skill to minimise stress over the long-term is to become more aware of how we are ‘choosing’ to make sense of the situation we find ourselves in. We have often grown into particular ways of thinking about ourselves and the world. These ‘automatic thoughts’ come to seem natural to us but may in fact be incorrect, and may even be producing unnecessary stress in us. Psychologists call these ‘cognitive distortions’. Research shows that if we understand these automatic ways of thinking, and the effects they may be having on us, we can identify them, replace or overcome them and reduce the stress we feel.

Ten common cognitive distortions are shown below. You may recognise some of them as applying to you from time-to-time. There is good evidence that you can improve your stress levels by working in a ‘self-help’ way on any distortions you recognise¹⁵. You can find two proven ways of doing this - a process for increasing your 'emotional agility' and a way to deal with distorted thought patterns by clicking the Exercises tab at the top of the page.

Disempowering beliefs

Our automatic cognitive distortions are part of a broader category of ways in which our beliefs about ourselves and our situation might be undermining our confidence and causing us stress. The broader group are called ‘disempowering beliefs’ and include interpretations that may be factually accurate but may not actually help us deal effectively with the world.

Imagine your team has lost the last ten pitches they have made to a client. An eleventh one comes in. Do you say “our track record is lousy with this client, we shouldn’t waste any time on it” or do you say “I think our skill set is exactly right for the work, we should go for it despite our previous track record with this client.” Same facts but a different ‘framing’. Broadly speaking, optimists get better results than pessimists even though they are less ‘realistic’ (see the optimism page) and it may well be that in this case the fact that the team has had ten failures, although accurate, is actually disempowering the team in its thinking about the new possibility.

You can address these broader disempowering beliefs using our exercise ‘Conquering disempowering beliefs’.

Tips for team leaders

It should be clear from all the above what a huge role team leaders have to play in reducing stress levels in the team:

To keep stress in your team to a minimum here’s how you can help most:

Make ‘people focus’ a central plank of your management style by empowering and supporting team members (see the Empowering people page).
Be clear about people’s roles and responsibilities.
Delegate power to match the responsibilities you give people and give people as much autonomy as you can (read more about autonomy and alignment here.)
Manage the team’s workload so that people can maintain a decent work-life balance.
Make sure team meetings feel ‘safe’ for people to contribute, that they aren’t dominated by one or two voices (see Improving team dynamics and Psychological Safety).
Be rigorously fair in your treatment of people – in the way you share information, delegate tasks and opportunities and give people opportunities to be heard (see the Inclusion page).
Manage challenging behaviour from team members as soon as possible to make sure relationships between people are always constructive and helpful - see the page on managing challenging behaviour.

1. Work-related stress, anxiety or depression statistics in Great Britain, 2019, Health and Safety Executive

2. Sood, A 2013 The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-free Living

3. Some excellent resources as starting points for both medical advice and wider stress management techniques are: https://www.nhs.uk/oneyou/every-mind-matters/stress/ Excellent NHS website with information and signposts to all kinds of support.

Similar from Australia, NZ, Canada, US: Australia: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/dealing-with-stress NZ: https://www.healthnavigator.org.nz/health-topics/stress/ Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/healthy-living/your-health/lifestyles/your-health-mental-health-coping-stress-health-canada-2008.html US: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relievers/art-20047257 Mayo Clinic is a world-leading nonprofit organization committed to clinical practice, education and research, providing expert, whole-person care to everyone who needs healing.

4. See for example Work-related stress, anxiety or depression statistics in Great Britain, 2019, Health and Safety Executive

5. Nixon, A.E, et al , 2011, Can work make you sick? A meta-analysis of the relationships between job stressors and physical symptoms, Work & Stress 25, 1, 1 - 22

6. Gallup 2014 The State of the American Manager

7. Crawford E.R, et al, 2010, Linking job demands and resources to Employee engagement and burnout: a theoretical extension and meta-analytic test, Journal of Applied Psychology 95, 5, 834 - 848

8. See eg Erskine, J.A and Georgiou G,J Leadership Styles: Employee stress, Well-being, Productivity, Turnover and Absenteeism https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325619710_Leadership_Styles_Employee_Stress_Well-being_Productivity_Turnover_and_Absenteeism for a concise summary of different leadership styles and their effects on stress, well-being and productivity

9. Nyberg, A et al, 2009, Managerial leadership and ischaemic heart disease among employees, Occupational and Environmental Medicine 66, 1

10. See, for example Hershcovis, M.S, 2011, “Incivility, social undermining, bullying ….:” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32, 499 - 519

11. Jones, K.P, et al., 2016, Not so subtle: A meta-analytic investigation of the correlates of subtle and overt discrimination, Journal of Management, vol 42, No 6, 1588 - 1613

12. Killingsworth M.A and Gilbert, D.T 2010, A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, Science, 330, Issue 6006 pp.932 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932

13. Baumeister R.F and Tierney, R 2011, Willpower, Penguin

14. Lyubomirsky, S 2010, The how of happiness, Piatkus

15. Hirai, M and Clum, G.A 2006 A Meta-Analytic Study of Self-Help interventions for Anxiety Problems, Behavior Therapy, 37, 99-111