Struggling with work stress? Discover effective strategies for managing stress at work and thriving in high-pressure work situations.
Navigating High-Pressure Situations
During our work interviews, one of the most common questions we get asked is, how well do you work under pressure? No matter what professional field you’re in, work stress and high-pressure work situations are not an alien concept. Most of us deal with these on a daily basis. And not all work stress is bad. In fact, according to findings, a moderate amount of work stress actually boosts performance and productivity and pushes you out of your comfort zone. If you look back at any of your greatest achievements at work, you probably would’ve gone through some amount of work stress to get the results. So, nothing wrong with experiencing high-pressure work situations once in a while.
However, work stress becomes a problem when it exceeds the optimal threshold. It can negatively impact your performance and creativity. It causes stress, anxiety, loss of focus, lower confidence, and, ultimately, burnout. So, the question arises: how do you manage stress at work? We’ll answer that for you ahead, but first, let’s begin by understanding the causes of stress at work and what it really means.
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Understanding High Pressure: What Does It Really Mean?
If you struggle with a demanding job that has tight deadlines and constant workloads, you’re in a high-pressure work situation. In this kind of work life, you’re constantly bombarded with tasks and not given enough downtime. There are many causes of stress at work, we’ll list down a few below:
- Mundane, repetitive and under-stimulating tasks
- Fewer breaks
- Being on your toes all-day
- Dealing with customers or patients non-stop
- Toxic managers or colleagues
- Instability in job security
- Unrealistic deadlines
These causes of stress at work can have many negative health effects such as insomnia, high blood pressure, anxiety, fatigue and digestive issues.
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Common High-Pressure Scenarios at Work
Now that we’ve understood some common causes of stress at work let’s break down high-pressure work situations to understand work stress better.
- Meeting timelines: Working with tight deadlines can be stressful for the managers as well as employees. Every working professional has to deal with meeting deadlines but unrealistic expectations can cause a very high level of stress.
- Dealing with emergencies: While certain professions, like medical practitioners and soldiers, accept emergencies as part of their jobs, our brains are not wired to handle serious emergencies one after the other. If you don’t belong to these professions, then you shouldn’t have to face urgent situations as part of your daily work routine.
- Changing demands: Not having clarity on your scope of work can have you juggling multiple job roles at once, which can take a toll on your mental health.
- Short-staffing: When your organisation is running low on staff, you end up taking on a lot more responsibilities than what you signed up for. This can cause immense work stress.
- Busy Seasons: Some months can be extremely stressful at work, for example, the festive season is a high-demand season for retail and e-commerce employees.
Read more: How to Reduce Stress
Tips to Handle Work Stress
After a deep delve into the causes of stress at work, it’s time to share some effective tips for managing stress at work. Taking all the causes of stress at work into consideration, here are some ways you can blow off the steam:
- Understand your stress tolerance level and draw boundaries with your managers and co-workers accordingly. You can get an idea of your threshold by taking feedback from your trusted co-workers.
- Identify exactly what are the causes of stress at work for you. These are also called triggers, and you can learn to navigate your workday by working around them. Plan ahead of time for these by communicating better and building self-awareness.
- Try calming exercises like deep breathing and meditation to alleviate work-related stress and anxiety.
- Physical activity has also been shown to help with combating all the causes of stress at work. This is because when you move, your body releases happy hormones which can counteract the stress hormones.
- Avoid acting on your first instinct. In any stressful situation, take a step back, think through the solutions and then act.
- Remember that you can’t control everything and sometimes the best thing to do is do nothing.
- Take regular breaks at work, even just for a few minutes. This will refresh your mind, and you will be better prepared to deal with work stress.
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Embracing Challenges as Opportunities
Most of us deal with work stress every day. There are many causes of stress at work like tight deadlines, toxic colleagues, fewer breaks, repetitive tasks and changing demands to name a few. While most work stress is good for you, it starts becoming stressful when it crosses your stress threshold. You can combat this by cultivating self-awareness, taking regular breaks, practising breathwork and meditation and doing physical exercise. Learn more about dealing with high-pressure situations from trusted experts on SoulSensei.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review – How to deal with high-pressure situations at work. By Tomas Chamorro Premuzic.
- Feed your potential 365 – 10 Ways to deal with high-pressure situations.
