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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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Financial aspects figured quite high on the Holmes and Rahe scale - for example, being affected by large debt or being involved in bankruptcy actually scored higher than the death of a close friend. This is because a sever change in financial status can bring about drastic changes in life-style such as for example the loss of a house, disruption of family life, not to speak of the psychological stress with regards to loss of status and self-esteem.

The constant stress and worry about finances can also be very stressful over longer term periods. Obviously when the economy becomes bad there are knock-on effects that can be very stressful and that each feature individually on the stress scale - this can include circumstances such as the loss of a job, having to move house, having a spouse take on a new job, having to work harder with less free time.

It must be remembered that we are all subjected to these stressful and life-changing events - everyone suffers from the economic consequences of a bad housing market, higher interest rates, foreclosures, becoming bankrupt, losing a job etc etc. But it is how we each react to these events that makes the difference between experience high stress and not being as stressed. Some people are just more resilient to some types of stresses than others.

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Causes of stress are primarily related to CHANGE – change in our working environment, change brought about by death or separation, change in our health, change in our daily living routines – and if one think of the rate of change that we have to deal with in our modern world in comparison with the rate of change up to about 100 years ago, we can realize why stress is so much more prevalent and recognized as a modern disease.

Please note that even positive change can be seen as being stressful – in other words, changes such as getting married, entering a new job, learning a new skill – all positive changes, you will agree, even these changes are stressful. Normally you have a mental map of how the world works, and you have learned certain life-skills to learn how to cope with the world ‘as-it-is’. When a change occurs, you have to learn new life-skills and even worse, break down your current mental map and rebuild a new one to help you cope with the change in your world.

Now, if we look at the rate of change that we have to cope with in modern life versus the rate of change that our forebears had to deal with, we can come to understand the amount of stress that we are really under.

Let’s look at the following four factors of the modern world contributing to stress
1. The rate of change that we have to deal with
2. Technological stress
3. Information overload
4. Interruption overload

1. The rate of change.
There are quite a few references to the fact that the rate at which change is happening in the world has increased dramatically.

Alvin Toffler, in his book Future Shock, said that future shock is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”. He went on to write another book about “The Third Wave” – where the ‘waves’ can be seen as periods of human activity – how the world works. As you can see, the time span in which the Information Age is measured is in decades where previous waves were measured in hundreds and thousands of years – this is an indication of the rate of change that we have to deal with.

 
2. Technostress.
A type of stress associated with this increasing rate of change is known as Technostress.

Wikipedia identifies technostress as the inability and associated stress that goes along with adapting to change in the technological world. It is the type of stress (loss of self-esteem!) that you experience when you cannot program your DVD player and your grandson has to do it for you. That is the old-fashioned example. A more modern, updated version would be the loss of self-esteem that you experience when you have to use your cell-phone and you cannot understand all the options.

3. Information overload
Hand in hand with the increasing rate of change is the increasing amounts of information that we have to process.

One just has to look at the following quote:

“Did you know that more new information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the previous 5,000? A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than average people in seventeenth century England were likely to come across in their lifetime. The amount of information available in the world has doubled in the last five years, and it keeps doubling.”

(Source: “Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know,” by John C. Maxwell. Nelson Books, 2002. ISBN: 0785264191)

All of this information that must be processed ads to our levels of stress, since it increases the decisions that we have to make, as well as informing us about the increasing amount of change in the world that we have to deal with.

4. This can lead to Interruption overload
In an article written in the Financial Times in August 2006, spoke about the concept of Interruption Overload. Due to the invasive use of technology such as email, cell-phones, blackberries, Instant Messaging and other instant communication devices, it is easier and easier to communicate – but these communications are often intrusive and impinge on an individual’s time and concentration. People are constantly being interrupted in the tasks that they are doing. It is estimated that it takes about 15 minutes to re-immerse yourself in the task that you were busy with before the interruption. All these mini-changes that you have to deal with, the extra pieces of information, the additional decisions, can add to stress if you feel that you cannot cope with it any more.

The bottom line is that our forebears had to deal with surviving the saber tooth tiger, we have to deal with surviving the computer mouse.

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