Hoping for a stress free holiday season
Coping with work stress
It’s that time of the year when you run into crowded stores and hear holiday music. Everybody seems to get involved in the happy mood of shopping for love ones and family members.
The sad a part about this time of the year is the concern about the way it makes some feel, being under the pressure to provide with no means or getting in debt. This causes much stress.
Yes, stress is a factor that plays a very important part in the world every day then seems to escalate around this time of the year. Women do you know how hard it is for an unemployed man to want to provide for his children yet can’t and all he hears from you is nagging about money?
I read that problems like this makes your nervous system start tripping out. Our body produces larger quantities of the chemicals cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline, which trigger a higher heart rate, heightened muscle preparedness, sweating, and alertness.
All these factors help us protect ourselves in a dangerous or challenging situation.
Sometimes, it’s just plain stress from your job. Does the boss even realize they are driving employees crazy? Laughing. Well, I am sure you have read about people who left the job because of the stress, that day to day pressure, from someone who is in charge and don’t know what they are doing.
While reading, the article went on to say, “some situations which are not negative ones may still be perceived as stressful. This is because we think we are not completely prepared to cope with them effectively. Examples being: having a baby, moving to a nicer house, and being promoted. Having a baby is usually a wonderful thing, so is being promoted or moving to a nicer house. But, moving is a well-known source of stress.”
Makes you wonder why the unemployment rate and homeless rate is so high. At this present moment, people are feeling this in Michigan. The day after Michigan’s legislature held an abrupt vote on right-to-work legislation, it has now been speculated that the Koch brothers are behind this.
This “right-to-work” bill will weaken labor unions in one of the countries most heavily unionized states. It has even sparked a visit by President Barack Obama. Many are mad because under right-to-work laws, any employee in a unionized workplace can refuse to join the union or pay union dues. These statutes are broadly understood to erode the influence and power of organized labor if unions can’t collect dues. They have fewer resources to survive.
A lot of times, stress just comes in the form of an ignorant person thinking they know it all and making your job harder. If they realize they don’t know what they are talking about, just step aside and allow the company to run smoother, this too will relieve stress.
Remember back in the day when many use to joke about going postal and everybody would laugh? In this day and time, if someone tells you that, you better tread life differently. In covering a lot of stories and seeing what’s happening everyday, someone will walk right in and just take your life.
Not trying to alarm no one, just trying to say be careful. Each day you read about someone going off and killing someone. Stressful conditions can always be a concern. In reading about stress, I found it can play with your mind. It stated “Long-term stress can also have serious effects on your mental health and behavior. If you are under stress for long periods of time, you may find that you have difficulty thinking clearly, dealing with problems, or even handling day-to-day situations as simple as shaving, picking up clothes or arriving somewhere on time.”
Life is full of changes and not all can handle change. Sometimes changes keep coming one after the other. If you don’t have ways to deal with them, you can become overstressed. Your body stays geared up and can’t relax. This can lead to physical problems, including heart disease. Too much stress increases a person’s risk for heart disease.
It can also make other risk factors worse. Most people can’t just will themselves to change overnight. Your usual responses to stress have been with you for a long time. To change those responses you will need to plan and practice. Here are a few tools you might like try them one at a time, until you find those that work for you.
The article also defined the levels of stress. There are three types of workplace stress: economic, business, and personal. A recession places economic stress on a business because the normal sources of capital and revenues dry up as banks refuse to loan money and customers stop buying. Business stress relates to the internal difficulties a company may experience in producing a quality product fast enough to meet demand or reorganizing its operations in order to improve the quality of its product. Personal stress affects business owners and employees alike. It is a result of long work hours, pressure to succeed, family, and health concerns.
What’s the right attitude to avoid work place stress? Attitudes toward stress management differ between management and labor. The Center for Disease Control performed a study in 1987 that defined the attitudes toward workplace stress held by corporate management versus those held by labor unions. The corporate approach placed responsibility for stress management on the employee and encouraged diet, exercise, behavior modification, and company programs to provide gym facilities and nutrition counseling.
Labor, on the other hand, emphasized health and safety clauses in contracts and encouraged the creation of committees to enforce the terms of these contracts. The study found that this politicization of workplace stress to suit the needs of each side of the employer/labor relationship caused even greater stress, particularly among employees.
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Write Wade at the Call & Post, 11800 Shaker Blvd., Cleveland, OH, 44120, or e-mail him at jwade@call-post.com. Comments and questions are welcome but, because of the volume of mail, personal responses are not always possible. Please note that comments or questions may be used in a future column.
