Working Smarter

by Joe Robinson

Which stress triggers really drive you up the wall?  People jumping out of their skin with crisis mentality? Workload? Interruptions? Relatives? Technology updates every other day? Traffic?

There’s no shortage of candidates, is there? How tired are you of all these people and scenarios being able to manipulate your emotional reactions and set off a racing pulse, churning stomach, and white-hot anger or fear?

No doubt, very tired in more ways than one. Stress burns up the energetic resources in your body, so a steady dose of it will fuel constant fatigue that is cumulative. The fatigue from the stress of the day comes out of your hide the next day and the next if the body doesn’t get back to pre-stressor levels. Does that ring true for you?

However, you could manage all these aggravations, if you knew where the stress was coming from and had the right practices vetted by the science to shut down the overreactive survival equipment. These are things I teach in my stress management programs for individuals and organizations.

UNMASKING THE CULPRIT

So, here's the weird thing about stress. All those triggers I listed above are not driving your stress. The culprit isn't the external event—the deadline or the setback.

Stress is the result of something much closer to home: your reaction to the stressful event. It’s your thoughts in the moment that turn on the stress response. Whaaat?

I hate to tell you this, but you’re stressing yourself out. It’s your reaction to the stressor that fuels your stress. It’s the story you tell yourself about the stressful event that creates the stress.

The good news about that, though, is you can reject the doom-filled story fed to you by your ancient brain, which is trying to induce panic to get you to run or fight, and create a new story of your own. This way, you control the narrative, and, importantly, the self-talk.

It’s not the end. It’s a learning experience. It’s not beyond your capacity to handle. You’ve handled many other difficult things in your life. In fact, every time your brain thought you couldn't handle something, guess what? You handled it. You're still here, still kicking.

To take command, you tell yourself that the frightful stories fed to you are false, coming from a part of your brain that sees every threat as imminent physical death. You can rebut that story and come up with one of your own that reflects reality.

The key to your story is that you will overcome the demands, whatever they may be, by adjusting how you think about them. Instead of seeing them as being beyond your capacity, you reframe them as a challenge within your ability to handle.

Stress management is all about getting perceived control over demands. Tell yourself you can manage it, change how you view the stressor, make new adjustments to the task or how you deal with someone that give you more control, and you alter the perception of the threat to one that you have the wherewithal to manage.

Stress is very relative. What stresses you out doesn’t stress out someone else, and vice-versa. We all have things that used to drive stress but don’t anymore anymore—no doubt, because you found a way to manage or control it. You took away its power. It’s easy to see from this the role we play in creating stress—and can play in eliminating it.

THE ART OF NON-REACTION

Managing stress is the art of non-reaction, defusing extreme fight-or-flight reactions as quickly as possible after they go off. One way you can do this is to see the stressor as a con job unless your physical life is in danger.

Your ancient brain baits you into emotional reactions that bypass the modern brain and go directly to the original brain, home of irrational emotions, which was all we had to run things before the higher organs of the brain evolved that could weigh pro or con and act rationally. You have to find a way to return command back to your modern faculties.

The mission before you is to tell your brain, “I won’t take the bait.” Life is, in essence, a battle to keep the fear default under control so you can function in the world, assess concerns accurately, and find rational solutions.

Not falling for the calamitous alarms of the overwrought security equipment and knowing you can create a substitute story of reality keeps dramas you don’t need down and life manageable.

There will be many opportunities over the coming days to catch yourself in the stress act, not take the bait, and opt out. Stay nonreactive, and you stay healthy.

I’m a mental health, stress management, and work-life speaker and trainer who has brought solutions to individuals and organizations from IBM to Pfizer, LEGO, Cisco, Ocean Spray, Kellogg’s, New York City Public Health, the National Council on Mental Wellbeing, Kaiser Permanente, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and across the world from Mumbai to Bogota. I’m author of Work Smarter Live Better, Work to Live, and Don’t Miss Your Life.

 

IN THE BEST stress management advice ever delivered in a pop song, Paul McCartney gave it a good try. Though tens of millions heard his plea, few “let it be.”

McCartney had it exactly right. So much angst in life has to do with the inability of the brain to let go of things, like, say, work.

THE POWER OF DETACHING

Stress is a byproduct of exaggerated fears and thoughts we give life to by ruminating about them incessantly. Rumination entrenches the false beliefs of stress and makes them appear real through repeated rehash of the concern in question. 

One of the keys to managing a major source of circular worries, job stress, as well as creating better work-life balance, is leaving work at work. That shuts off the day's stressors and allows the body to repair itself from the effects of strain and tension. That goes for remote workers as well. Even more so, since it's so easy for them to just keep going without self-boundaries at home.

It’s called work recovery by researchers, a process of detaching from work thoughts and engaging in experiences that help restore the body to pre-stressor levels. It's a reset button that flips the switch on stowaway stress with proactive recovery strategies.

Initiating leisure and recuperative strategies is something few of us are equipped for after the age of 20. As a result, most of us go home without a plan for how to let go of the day’s events and shift over to another mindset. And managers would never imagine that they can play a major role in the process simply by encouraging staff to recharge after work in whichever way they enjoy—exercise to music and hobbies.

The science shows that psychological detachment from work through relaxation and recreation isn’t something to feel guilty about—it’s essential for attention, engagement, and wellness at work and at home. Without recovery from the strain that results from unmanaged demands, any number of medical issues, from cardiovascular disease to irritable bowel to burnout can occur, as well as poor performance, cynicism, presenteeism and absenteeism.

RECOVERY IS A TWO-WAY STREET

Research by Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz and others has documented that a break from the work state of mind allows recovery from strain and ends the pattern of negative affect that drives pessimism and chronic stress. Studies show that people who are able to detach from the day's work tensions are more likely to report positive mood in the morning and a reduction in stress. No doubt, these folks are also having a lot more fun, since stress suppresses the play equipment in the brain.

New research shows that turning off the stress replay machine after work is as critical for employees and leaders as it is during work hours, and that managers can play a key role in helping employees restore well-being at home. A study that looked at the intersection of supervisor signals and norms around recovery (Bennett, Gabriel, Calderwood, Dahling, Trougakos) found that when employees are encouraged by managers to unwind after work, they are more likely to do just that, leading to a healthier staff and workplace.

“If supervisors adopt norms supporting employees leaving work at work, employees will seek to meet these expectations,” the authors wrote. 

Supervisors who are supportive of exercise, recreation, and pastimes have a big influence on the employee’s ability to shift out of the work mind and get the relaxation, social interaction, or detachment they need for recovery.

Job strain and time pressure over the course of the day tax mental resources, requiring extra effort to get anything done. If energetic and self-regulation resources burned up over the course of the day aren’t replaced, it comes out of our performance hide the next day and the next in the form of fatigue, researchers have found. The toll has to be countered on a daily basis. 

READING THE SIGNALS

When managers don’t signal that it’s okay to step back after work, the Bennett, Gabriel study found that employees are more prone to take work home with them and to ponder work issues. 

It starts with something as basic as asking what a staffer is doing to recharge and refuel. Inquire about hobbies. What do they do for exercise? Let them know that performance is the sum total of the whole person—energy, health, optimism, and mood. People who go home with negative affect and stress that is not alleviated come back to work the next day with negative affect.

Let employees know you want them to leave the workday at the office and live a healthy life outside it, since a fresh and energized mind is the key to productivity in the knowledge economy.

So what can we do to restore resources at the end of the day and shut off the stress loop? Let’s look at the four main routes to work recovery: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. Studies show that these recovery processes can reduce fatigue, increase work engagement (Brummelhuis, Bakker) and improve health and well-being (Sonnentag, Binnewies, Mojza).

 FOUR RECOVERY KEYS

1. Psychological detachment. This is a fancy description of something pretty logical. Stop thinking about work and the worries that flow from it. It's easier said than done, though, when the adrenaline is high after a tough day, and the rumination parade of projected anxieties is under way.

Continuing to think and talk about work issues keeps you mentally at work, so find ways to change the subject. Another option is to create physical and electronic barriers to prevent the default to a desk or work emails and help separate work and home. Imagine yourself flipping a light switch off as you leave work. You’ve switched over to another job now, your life.

2. Relaxation. There is a false belief in our work culture that you have to be near collapse before you are entitled to relax. Taking care of yourself needs no justification. Relaxation is built in to the human physiology. Activation periods of stress are meant to be followed by the reparative parasympathetic system of rest and maintenance. Relaxing is essential to recover and restore the body and the brain's equilibrium to pre-stressor levels. 

Create a buffer zone when you get home from work of 30 minutes or more, if you can, to do what you like to do to relax—go for a run, meditate, hit the gym, listen to music (one of the best stress shifters since stress is dependent on dire mood). Make it a routine. 

3. Mastery. Research shows that mastery experiences are one of the best ways to promote recovery and knock out stress. These are activities done outside of work that allow for personal growth, skill-building, and learning. We all have three core needs--autonomy, competence, and connection with others. Mastery experiences put us in touch with these needs and get us aligned with who we are. 

Whether it’s cycling, salsa dancing, learning a musical instrument or a language—studies show that the mastery process can shut off stress activation even in the middle of work, at lunchtime, as well as at home. Identify things you want to learn, potential passions, and you crowd out negative affect with the positive vibe that comes from autonomy and competence. A passion can add eight hours of joy to your week, the ultimate antidote to stress.

4. Control. The activating ingredient in stress is control, or rather, the lack of it. The more control, or latitude, we feel we have over a stressor, the less perceived stress. There are two sides of the control issue, control at work, i.e., having the ability to make some decisions about work processes, not the work itself, and leisure control, deciding how to spend your off-hours. Find ways during the day to experience more choice over how you work, or get a shot of it on a break. One study found that playing a computer game on a break increases recovery (Reinecke). 

Increased leisure control reduces strain by helping you feel more in charge of your life and able to put aside a bad day with something that lifts you up and is autonomous. The idea here is to identify what you, not others, like to do for fun and recreation and indulge it regularly. You have to be entrepreneurial about your leisure activities. No one can choose them or make them happen but you. Most of what we do outside of work is ad hoc, minus thought or planning. Put leisure ideas and activities on the calendar, or they don’t happen. Take your life as seriously as your work.

The strain-stress cycle is pretty simple in its insidiousness. It goes off automatically and we react on reflex, fanning the false alarms with rumination and helplessness. The solution is getting off autopilot,  contesting stress, and engaging in recovery processes that help us get back to the pre-stress state. Work recovery science shows us the way forward, that managing stress is both a proactive work AND life process in which we learn how to put McCartney’s advice to work. And let it be.

If you would like to learn more about our stress management programs for your team and organization, click the button below for more details.