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Posts Tagged ‘losing your job’

Work related stress probably contributes the most to stress these days since such a lot of our time is taken up by the world of work. Various sets of circumstances that are work related have been identified as being stressful. These include, for example, taking on a new role at work or changing jobs, losing your job, partner starts a new job.

All of these are easily identifiable, however, it is the insidious continuous stress-inducing events that is not mentioned on the scale that seems to be a major source of stress today. Examples are:
- Overwork : Too many of us take on too much responsibilities, either through choice (Personality Type A) or through major changes in the place of work such as ‘downsizing’, and slowing down of the economy. Lots of organizations, when the economy gets tough, save money through making people redundant. What this often means in practice is that the same amount of work needs to be done with less people. Often the staff who remain get saddled with the responsibility of doing their own, as well as their deposed colleague’s work. In fear of losing their own jobs, they often just knuckle under and start doing the extra work without complaining.
- Technological advances in the workplace: Technology is advancing at a rapid pace and new technological equipment and tools are deployed in the workplace on an almost daily basis. The employee is expected to keep up but lots of people are just not technically inclined and this leads to technostress - the inability to cope with technological changes in the workplace.
- Too much information. We are living in an information age, and the focus of the workplace is changing to working with information. A large portion of this is linked to the way that we can now access information in volumes unheard of previously. This volume of information is not necessarily a good thing since it places a strain on our abilities to process the information. Each piece of information such as a news bulletin, an advertisement, an email, a voicemail, a telephone call, an SMS, an Instant Message - all of these pieces of information must be assessed, processed and acted upon. This is placing a tremendous amount of strain on us with regards to the amount of time that we have available to get things done in day. Every piece of information that we need to process makes a demand on our time and interrupts out train of thought. Trying to do too many things at the same time is a typical symptom of extreme Type A type personality behavior, but frankly, with the way that our world is structured, it is difficult to avoid that. You get bombarded with pieces of information wherever you go - in the train and in the bus and driving to work you might listen to the news on the radio, be bombarded with giant advertisements adorning the sides of the roads, the sides of buildings and inside shop windows advertising new products and services, see a couple of TV commercials and news bulletins while waiting in a queue for coffee or in the bank, deal with two or three urgent phone calls that came through while you were traveling, as well as a couple of SMS messages informing you of a meeting that has been scheduled urgently that you need to attend. That is why one of the stress management techniques that can be applied is to limit yourself to the amount of information that you need to handle!
- Travel and commuting - not all of us can afford to live close to our places of work and some of us have to travel long hours to get to work. It can be tremendously frustrating to spend a couple of hours per day just traveling in adverse conditions - whether that be crammed together like sardines in stuffy and hot underground trains, or sitting in your car in a traffic jam with no end in site, knowing all the while that your kids are waiting to be fetched, the supper still needs to be prepared and you will have even less time for yourself.

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