Wellbeing Wednesday: managing stress in the workplace
We all experience stress and recent months have placed additional pressure on people both at work and at home. It is important that we effectively manage our stress, as a central part of our personal wellbeing.
Regardless of our role or experience it seems that stress is an ever-present challenge in our modern world. Whilst we may have the skills to help our team or patients manage their own stresses, we rarely get taught how to apply these for ourselves, which means we can find it hard when challenges hit us.
Our Staff Wellbeing Team is keen to change this. We’ve asked Staff Wellbeing Lead Jamie Broadley to share some advice on managing stress.
Stress is an extremely personal thing and can affect each of us in very different ways. We believe that the first stage in effective stress management is defining the challenge and breaking it down. Feeling generally stressed means we aren’t clear on the potential causes, which can therefore make it harder to implement an effective intervention.
A really helpful first step is to use a stress wheel, like our example below, to think through what are the areas of life that are causing most stress. Think about how much stress each area is causing you on a scale of 1-10. If you are 10/10 stressed, shade the full section of the wheel; if you are 1/10 stressed, shade the inside corner. Shade in more or less of the wheel depending on how stressed you are.
From this point you can now see which are the areas you will want to target. For each of these the team can then help you dig a layer deeper to understand what the triggers might be and what the effects of this stress might be in terms of symptoms that we experience. For the high stress areas, try to jot down some thoughts in a table like the example below:
| Stressor | Trigger | Stress Symptom | Current unhelpful coping strategy | Current helpful coping strategy |
| Finances | Getting a bill through the post, looking at my payslip, the cost of my weekly shop | Not sleeping, feeling anxious, racing heart, being irritable with family, withdrawing at work | Drinking, distracting myself with TV | Referring back to monthly budget planning, looking at cheaper places to shop at, and cutting out unnecessary expenses. |
The team then advises thinking through what your current coping strategies are and whether they are useful or not. We can define this by whether they actually target the source of the stress and try to improve it, or whether they simply numb the stress or distract you from it.
You now know what the source of stress is, what your triggers are, how these affect you and where there are gaps in your coping strategies. The final step is to now fill those gaps so you have a robust response to manage stress at source. Look at your symptoms and think what strategies might work in addressing them. In the example above, feeling anxious and having a racing heart could both be targeted by using a breathing technique. You can then add this to your own ways of handling stress, knowing that you’ll likely need to use it when you are about to experience one of the triggers you identified.
We hope this is helpful as a quick insight into stress management.
Support at work
There are many sources of support to help you if you are experiencing stress at work.
These are listed on the 'mental health' page in the wellbeing section on Focus. Please take a look.
