Addressing the Root Causes of Work Stress

In my previous post, I shared four examples of how your stress might manifest and provided techniques for reducing the impact of a perceived threat. In this post, we’ll discuss the underlying causes of job stress and what you can do to create a healthier and more manageable environment.

What is Stress?

Stress is the body’s response to real or perceived threats. While it can sometimes be helpful and just the kick in the pants you need, it often does more harm than good.

Unlike generalized stress, job stress is defined only in the negative (seems like a bit of a bias, but I’m not in charge). The CDC 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.”

Causes and Mitigating Factors

There are a few common paths to unmanageable job stress. Let’s examine each in turn and discuss what you can do to reduce the threat itself or reduce the impact of stress on you.

I often refer to these approaches as 1) making a dent in the problem and 2) reducing the dent it makes in you.

Unreasonable Expectations

This is when the effort required to complete a task up to the desired standard doesn’t match the time allotted.

Many people adopt the “suck it up, buttercup” approach in these situations and try to muddle through. That’s not a sustainable strategy.

Instead, make a dent in the problem by communicating with your manager all the components of your workload and the time you expect it will take to complete them. Potential remedies include:

Your manager identifies things on your list that don’t need to be there. The effort required falls into line with the time available.Your manager helps you put the tasks in priority order, and you work on one at a time to complete them. This reduces stress because you know you’re aligned and that the most essential things are being completed first.Your manager provides advice, support, or additional resources to help you meet your expectations in less time than you anticipated.

Good managers realize that a mismatch between what you need to do and how much time you have to do it will only make you more stressed and less productive (not to mention compromising your quality, creativity, and mental health). A good manager will willingly help you triage and prioritize to reduce the gap between expectations and capacity.

But maybe you don’t have a good manager.

In that case, you can reduce the dent an unmanageable workload makes in you by resisting the urge to multi-task and finding ways to be as efficient as possible, including:

Be ruthless about working on one thing at a time. Remove all distractions and work in focused bursts to get more done. Multitasking and divided attention is slower and also anxiety provoking. Even with the same long to-do list, you’ll get through the work faster and be less stressed if you do one thing at a time.Seek support from your peers. Tell them what’s on your plate and identify opportunities for them to lend a hand, provide advice, or devise a better strategy for delivering what you need. Knowing your teammates have your back will make your load feel lighter, even if the actual workload hasn’t changed.Take breaks to allow your body and mind to reset. Match your breaks to whatever energizes you: take a brisk walk or workout, spend 15 minutes chatting with friends, stop and get yourself organized, or reconnect to the purpose of your work. People experience being overwhelmed differently. Here’s some advice on an individualized approach that might work for you.

Unfortunately, when you perceive your workload as a threat, your body and mind go into a mode that is seldom helpful for productivity. To stay above the fray, take one or more of those actions to alleviate the cause of the stress or short-circuit your stress response.

Insufficient or Poorly Matched Skills

Although some job stress is due to unmanageable workloads, your stress might be less about how much you have to do and more about what you need to do. If you don’t feel you have the skills to be successful, it can make you feel very vulnerable.

Make a dent in the problem by upgrading your skills or accessing them elsewhere, such as:

Ask for additional formal training or seek out resources from your network or publicly available sources.Ask to shadow someone who has already mastered the task you’re responsible forRequest that your manager redistribute some components of the task to someone more capable or better suited.

It would be wonderful if all managers ensured employees were positioned to succeed before assigning them a task, but we still have lots of “throw ‘em in the deep end and see if they sink or swim” folks out there. If you’re getting no sympathy for the poor match between your skills and your role, you need to protect yourself in other ways.

Reduce the dent a skill gap makes in you by:

Communicating to those around you that you’re worried rather than trying to fake it ‘til you make it (which is more likely to wind up as ‘fake it ‘til you break it’).Note what’s going well and what you’re learning so you can focus on the distance you’ve come rather than how far you still have to go: Progress rather than perfection.Find moments of levity and celebrate your noble failures. You can even create a punch card and give yourself a stamp when you make a mistake. Every 10 earns you an ice cream or a free commiseration session with a friend.Poor Treatment

Your job stress might not be about the work at all. In fact, that might be the best part of the job. Instead, your stress might come from nasty, abusive, disrespectful, or unfriendly treatment from your boss or coworkers. Yuck.

To make a dent in the problem, try one of the following:

Provide feedback to your colleagues about how their behavior is impacting you. Be sure to make the feedback objective so you don’t trigger backlash.Request what you need from your colleagues to be at your best. Be clear about your boundaries and what helps you to be a good collaborator.Seek out advice and support from people outside your team, such as a manager in a different department or someone in HR. Get their perspective on whether your reactions are justified, and if so, ask for strategies that might alleviate some of the problematic behavior.

It would be wonderful if your colleagues took your feedback and requests seriously and turned a new leaf, but that’s not going to happen every time. If you find your colleagues toxic, abrasive, or distant, you need an alternative approach.

Reduce the dent that poor treatment makes in you by:

Paying deliberate attention to the positive or neutral interactions you have. Unfortunately, once you conclude that your colleagues are treating you poorly, your confirmation bias will kick in, and you’ll only see the negative. Rebalance that by noting what’s good (or at least not horrible).Find other sources of support during your day. Touch base with friends or supportive colleagues to remind you you’re valued. Look for other people sitting alone in the cafeteria and pull up a seat.Prioritize supportive relationships and fun connections outside of work so the isolation of being on a bad team doesn’t zap your energy and turn you off people in general. Plus, those friends might be the bridge to a new job on the team you deserve.Job Insecurity

I would be remiss to exclude a significant source of job stress for many people: the fear of being terminated or laid off.

You might not be able to control the fate of your organization (or the global economy), but you can reduce the dent job insecurity makes in you if you:

Focus on delivering the most important outcomes the organization needs. You’d be surprised how many people I find gossiping about potential job losses for half an hour at the coffee pot while others are making themselves indispensable.Invest in and tend to your network constantly, not just when you feel insecure. Use LinkedIn actively by connecting with people you know or with whom you might have things in common. Get on their radar slowly and genuinely by commenting on their posts or sharing information or articles that might be relevant to them.Respond constructively to stress by channeling some of your spending into a savings account that will provide breathing room if you end up unemployed.Perfectionism or Imposter Phenomenon

One final thought: some job stress isn’t job stress; it’s you stress. By that, I mean that no one is imposing an unmanageable workload or throwing you in the deep end. Instead, you’re telling yourself a story that makes you feel threatened. I like to refer to this with the expression from horror movies, “The call is coming from inside the house.”

To reduce the impact of these problems, try the following:

Invest extra time in getting aligned with your manager on what they expect. Don’t just ask about what good looks like; inquire about what “too good” would look like. Once you know what’s fit for purpose, you can reframe that you’re getting further from the standard if you keep working toward perfection.Seek perspective from colleagues and friends about the quality of your work.Take time to coach and counsel friends who are also stressed and feeling out of their depth. Research shows that encouraging someone else to be kind to themselves will make you kinder to yourself (win-win for the win!).

Job stress is a vicious cycle where unreasonable expectations, poor treatment, or unhealthy narratives cause you to fret and, in the process, become less efficient and less effective. Then you worry and stress not just about the original problem but also about the compounding effects of your stress-addled brain getting further behind, more inept, less collaborative, more expendable, and so on.

Pull yourself out of the stress doom loop first by honestly attempting to improve the situation. If that fails, protect yourself with techniques to manage the stress, even if you can’t eliminate it.

Additional Resources

What does your stress look like?

10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed

8 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed by Your Workload

 

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