What If Work Wasn’t So Stressful? It Might Be Easier Than You Think…

I started this blog in part to help share the lessons I have learned as an organizational psychologist that has made my work or others’ work better. Today’s topic: Work Stress.

Work stress has increased a lot this year for millions of people. Many media outlets have published articles, blog posts, and stories about the need to emphasize employees’ mental health. I dedicate this post to explaining some of the scientific foundations to work stress and highlight a few of the big findings in research about the topic. Hopefully, it allows you to better understand where many of the suggestions come from, why they might be important, and ultimately how you can help those you work with and yourself during a potentially distressing time. I also provide some useful resources at the end apart from this post.

There are several ways to study work stress and it is tough to concisely and broadly talk about this. I am going to try and pick out a few foundational concepts to hopefully give people enough of an understanding of the topic to not only help you understand the articles that have been written, but hopefully this can also give you the foundation to start thinking of practical solutions. Just know that this is a very brief overview of the topic and barely scratches the surface!

The Work Stress Framework

Broadly speaking, work stress is conceptualized with stressors and strains. Stressors are the things that make you feel stressed out. That could involve just about anything like your boss, workload, being in an ethical jam, uncertainty in your job, or lack of choice at work. Stressors range from mild and common annoyances (like a coworker who chews loudly) to traumatic experiences or chronic conditions (like fearing for your life or having a long-term health condition).

Strain is the negative effective of those stressors on us. Like stressors, these can be pretty mild like temporarily feelings of disappointment to very serious conditions like deteriorated physical and mental health. You may have noticed that a long-term health condition might be a stressor or a strain, highlighting some of the complexity of studying stress.

Common Strains

The start of examining your own work stress might begin with a question something like, “why do [or don’t] I feel x”. That line of thought is often starting with the strains and working backwards. Then hopefully you can find what has frustrated you or caused some kind of difficulty in the work place. Here are some of the most common strains people see at work.

Burnout has a lot of research on it and has also been adopted into common language as well. Burnout is the result of pretty much every work stressor you can imagine: a poor relationship with your boss, being over worked, job uncertainty, lower optimism, role ambiguity in your role at work all lead to feelings of burnout. It tends to show up in occupations that are service oriented, but can be present for pretty much anyone. Burnout in turn leads to things like lower employee engagement, absenteeism, and depression.

Physical symptoms of stress can vary widely, but I wanted to mention it because it may not be what you think of as connected to feeling strain and it may not become an issue until people experience stressors for an extended period of time. These physical symptoms can include headaches, jaw pain, poor sleep, upset stomach/indigestion, cardiovascular disease, or even hives.

Non-clinical anxiety and depression are ones that can be tricky because we’re not talking about disorders like a clinical psychologist would deal with. It’s about the more common negative feelings around work that typically arise for many people. The problem is that when people are feeling those anxious or depressive feelings, it often leads to things like burnout or the clinical disorders of the same name. They can be caused by any number of things at work such as high workload, high work pace, interpersonal conflict, being bullied at work, and abusive or just plain poor supervision.

Common Stressors

When you think about your job, there are probably a few particular stressors that quickly come to mind. They might be related to the people you work with, the structure of your work, or things going on outside of work. I will highlight a few common stressors centered on the ideas of uncertainty and work design. I don’t directly call out the stressor of having a bad boss, because many of these things are often the result of exactly that. So don’t worry, that was part of why I highlight these stressors.

Job uncertainty is just what it sounds like: uncertain conditions around whether or not someone will continue to work in their job. This might be because of potential downsizing, mergers, or acquisitions, or it could be factors external to the organization that effect work that may lead to them losing their job (e.g., a worldwide pandemic). Employees who feel this are less satisfied, less engaged, and tend to have more work-related anxious and depressed feelings.

Role ambiguity includes uncertainty about your job duties or whom to report to, which, as you might be able to imagine, creates a lot of issues. Both of these are really important during times of crisis (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic) because the structure of work changes to accommodate a suddenly altered environment. If management and their employees do not adapt well enough, the ensuing breakdown in responsibilities and work flow can make work expectations confusing. Role ambiguity is also a common issue with matrixed organizations. Understandably, role ambiguity leads to negative things like higher burnout, lower engagement, and frustration at work.

Work-life balance is a topic that gets a lot of attention with reason. Often, this refers to work and family responsibilities but can also reference non-family issues like how to set boundaries when working from home. The absence of work-life balance can result in pretty much any of the strains that I referenced above and could create role conflict for employees as they try to meet the many demands in all areas of their life. Part of this could also be ensuring that we get social connection as well.

Job demands are universal but having too many job demands creates issues. Having a lot of work to accomplish can feel overwhelming and lead to burnout and anxious feelings about work, especially if combined with looming deadlines. Job demands are often one source of work-life balance issues and may be indicative of other underlying concerns. For example, you might have high workload because you are trying to answer to two people who are both considered your boss. If they don’t communicate well, you can easily become overloaded.

Managing Your Stress

The unfortunate thing is that you have likely had your own experiences involving these stressors and strains. So what do you do about it?

Research has shown that we only have a certainly amount of physical and mental resources. The activities we do use up those resources and experiencing stressors use even more resources than normal. Using more resources than we have creates strain. We can engage in recovery activities to gain those resources back though. As we learn to balance the resource gain and the resource use, we reduce the amount of strain we feel. The resource that help you increase those resources often are some form of lowering demand, increasing control, or increasing support. Here are some of the things that I have found useful for regaining those resources or at least slowing resource use.

Show Gratitude

Expressing your genuine thanks to someone else can improve both of your moods. It can help you focus on some of the positive aspects of your life and help to mitigate many of the strains that we feel. It can have both short- and long-term effects. The nice thing is that showing gratitude is highly adaptable to your personal preferences. It might be a gratitude journal, sending a thank you note to someone, or thanking someone in person (as much as social distancing will allow). There have been many recently videos of people showing gratitude in creative ways. Find out some way to show your genuine thanks to someone else.

Seek Social Support

This is not a new suggestion or idea, but it’s a key one to remember. It’s part of reducing demand and connecting with others. The tough thing is that in our least secure moments, asking for help can be very difficult. It might seem like asking for help is a sign of our own incompetence. However, sometimes we just get in over our heads with work. And talking through issues are a great way to focus in on the problem and brainstorm.

Provide Social Support

Track Your Emotions

The need to recover from work is high when we have used up our resources and your recovery experience is important to replenishing those resources. These experiences could be ones that help you relax or help you master a hobby. You can identify the most effective activities for you by tracking how you feel before the weekend and when the new week begins. If you note a marked improved from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, then review what you did over the weekend and try it again. If you’re really structured, you can plan specific activities and test out how you feel Friday and Monday. The big thing is to pay attention to what is working and what doesn’t. Keeping a journal is a good accessible way to record how you feel.

Use Your Strengths

When things are stressful, your strengths might help you efficiently work through tough situations. Research shows evidence that high workload and emotional demand at work can be mitigated by relying on what you do well. Emphasizing those characteristics allows you rely on the most readily available and effortlessly applied skills that you have to accomplish things more easily.

Reframe Stressors

Research shows that reframing stressors as a challenge to be overcome instead of a hindrance to your work is effective at reducing the negative effects of stressors at work. Try to approach things at work as new challenges and as opportunities to show what you can do. This reframing of the situation can take any stressor and make it advantageous. The caution with this is that we don’t want to reframe things like mistreat or discrimination at work. No one should have to put up with that. But reframing can be useful for handling the less severe stressors and looking good for your boss(es).

Final Thoughts

None of us will go through our work free of any worry or challenges. The key is being able to identify issues and make them more bearable or maybe even eliminate them altogether. Remember that what I presented is a few basic ideas to looking at stress. There is a lot more that researchers have to say that can be helpful. To give you some examples of what other researchers have to say, take a look at the links below. I’m confident that you will find something relevant and helpful for you.

The Society of Occupational Health Psychology
Distress During COVID-19
Worker Well-Being SIOP White Papers
Social Isolation and COVID-19 (not as work related but relevant to the time of this post!)

Thanks for reading!

-Brandon
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