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Is Your Job Stressing You Out?

© Barbara J. Mitchell

We've talked about stress on this page before, but in very general terms. This time let's concentrate on stress at work and how it can wreck the rest of your life.

The stressors at work are numerous: a co-worker who is difficult to get along with, a supervisor who expects too much (or on the other hand doesn't supervise), gossip, poor physical working environment, and others. They can be as simple to solve as buying a headset instead of wrestling with a telephone receiver all day, or as thorny as dealing with sexual harassment.

The stress caused by computers alone is enough to drive some of us batty, even without the ILOVE YOU virus.

In short, you come home from work every day with a headache. You're short-tempered, jumpy, tired all the time yet can't sleep, and your doctor just said your blood pressure is too high. What can you do, short of looking for another job, where you'll likely just endure the same stressors with different people?

Your doctor may or may not recognize the effects of stress on your general health. He'll treat the symptoms but that doesn't get to the core of the problem, so you'll leave his office with a prescription and no real solution. Personally, I don't care to make the pharmaceutical companies any richer than they already are.

Coping skills are what you need. Have you heard? The person who sacrifices everything to work night and day is no longer the big hero he was a few years ago. If you look at the young success stories of today, you'll see that they have a much lighter attitude. True, many of them are computer geniuses who are making zillions, so what's to worry about? However, many of them are ordinary people like the rest of us who just have a better handle on keeping balance in their lives.

Your first priority should be to take care of yourself. You have many responsibilities, not least of which is the one to keep yourself healthy so you can be parent, lover, employee, friend, son/daughter, etc.

Adequate sleep is important. Try to go to bed at a decent hour every night and get up at about the same time every day (even Sunday) to get your body attuned to a regular schedule and avoid insomnia. But, if you can't get to sleep one night, don't worry it into a big issue. Tomorrow night will be better.