Understand the Five Components of Stress

When it comes to workplace stress, I’ve got both bad news and good news.

The bad news? If your work stresses you, you’re not alone. A 2013 study by Harris Interactive for Everest College showed that 83% of American workers experience stress about their jobs. That was an increase from 73% in 2012. Low pay topped the list of work stressors, with unreasonable workload, annoying coworkers, and commuting also named as major sources of stress. The World Health Organization has estimated that stress costs American businesses up to $300 billion a year.

The good news? You can manage your response to stress. As with many things, the first step to taming stress is to understand it. With that awareness, you can choose strategies to reduce stress factors and improve how you handle the stress you face.

I spoke recently about workplace stress with my colleague, Dawa Tarchin Phillips, who will talk about managing workplace stress during his live webcast on Tuesday, April 5, the first of his Mindful Leadership Breakthrough System series. We talked about what he calls the workplace stress puzzle and how to deal with different kinds of stressors.

What is Workplace Stress?

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) defines job stress as: the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.

Five Components to Workplace Stress 

Phillips identifies five pieces to the workplace stress puzzle. They include:

1. Stressors
2. Stress response
3. Individual differences
4. Allostatic load
5. Allostatic balance

Allostatic refers to allostasis, “the process of achieving stability, or homeostasis, through physiological or behavioral change.”

Stressors are that which provokes stress. At work, that can mean job tasks, roles, and relationships with coworkers and supervisors.

The stress response is how our brain and body responds to the stressor. I’ve written extensively about “amygdala hijacks” and the brain science behind the fight/flight/freeze/faint reactions that stress can trigger.

Individual differences refer to the fact that each individual experiences stress differently. What can cause stress for one person may not be as stressful for someone else.

Paying attention to allostatic load recognizes that experiencing stress causes emotional and physiological changes. A single, simple stressor that causes minor stress makes short-term changes. More complex stressors or a combination of many stressors combine to have a larger, longer-term impact.

Allostatic balance is the process of recovering from stress and returning to a place of physiological and emotional balance.

Five Ways to Reduce Stress

Phillips suggests five ways to respond to and prevent workplace stress in his article “How Leaders Can Lower Workplace Stress.” He said,

• Pay attention to how you react to a “trigger” situation. Assess the conditions and causes that brought on stress or anxiety in a specific situation. This helps you to identify stress triggers so that you can become aware of them earlier, remedy them more swiftly or prepare yourself to deal with them more effectively as they surface. A mind aware of its triggers is better equipped for making new and improved choices.

• Develop self-awareness to improve self-management. Paying attention to the mental and physical signs and experiences that occur during stressful situations gives you an opportunity to practice composure. Ultimately, your emotional state at any given moment is bound to improve.

• Stay present. Dwelling on the past prevents you from identifying important clues and information available and disclosed in the present moment. And if you do happen to get a few free moments to yourself, stop rehashing whatever stressful scenario keeps arising in your mind; instead, turn your focus to a more positive present reality or brainstorm solution-focused ways to overcome the problem.

READ: Simple Ways Leaders Can Help to Refocus a Team's Negative Outlook

• Learn to meditate. It calms the mind, and increases focus and concentration. Meditation also improves your mental agility so that when you switch back and forth between tasks you can do so quickly, deliberately, with less distraction and greater ease. You might find my article on what mindfulness is – and isn’t useful in discerning the difference between mindfulness and meditation.

• Breathe. It’s simple, yet often abandoned or compromised when anxiety arises. A few deep breaths will oxygenate your brain and improve the clarity of your thinking. Here is a simple exercise you can do: Breathe in and count one… then breath out and count one. Breathe in and count two… then breathe out count two. Breathe in and count three… then breathe out. Keep repeating this in a steady rhythm. To ground yourself further during the process, place your hands on your abdomen or chest and observe the sensation of your abdomen or chest rising and settling. Learn to relax in the experience.

To learn more from Phillips about how to use mindfulness to manage stress in the workplace, tune in to his Mindful Leadership Breakthrough System series.

The live webcasts are designed to help executives and leadership development professionals apply mindfulness principles to overcome common internal and external barriers to presence, productivity and performance.