Information sheet: Stress at Work
Stress at Work
Stress is never an agreed condition of employment.
Yet we meet stress regularly in the workplace. Calculations of its toll upon health, productivity and efficiency escalate with each fresh study.
The problem of stress has been aired at conferences of the TUC and the Manufacturing Science and Finance Union. In an MSF commissioned survey, 94% of health professionals said that work stress had significantly increased in the last five years. Some managements have tried to implement the recommendations – perhaps as much to offset legal liability as to consider their employees' welfare. In one case, a social worker who suffered a breakdown was awarded £300,000 in the High Court.
But Health & Safety Council recommendations will hardly resolve the subtle and complex stresses that can get at us in our working re-lationships and environments.
Many major causes of work stress have been identified.
These are cited as job insecurity due to staff cuts, work overload also due to staff cuts, bad workplace design and conditions, poor communications with management, low pay, collapse of pension schemes, lack of incentives, discrimination, racial and sexual harassment, bullying, rivalry, monotony, repetitive strain, inadequate training, excessive and irregular hours, insufficient breaks.
In addition, modern technology has spawned new, invisible stressors. Toxicity from synthetic building materials and office furnishings and fittings ("Sick Building Syndrome") can combine with microwaves and electromagnetic fields from communications and IT equipment to produce lethargy, nausea, depression and anxiety.
There are several major effects of work stress.
These effects have been identified as behaviours such as alcohol and drug abuse, aggressiveness, accident proneness, withdrawal, breakdown of relationships at work and in the family and society; and conditions such as tiredness, anxiety, depression, headache, backache, insomnia, indigestion, dizziness, chest pain, sweating, impotence, frigidity, ulcers, asthma, migraine, hypertension, heart disease.
Executive stress.
This has been portrayed as more debilitating than stress at lower levels of status and responsibility. However, a highly-paid employee can afford stress-relief through holidays, leisure activities and entertainments and can in addition feel buoyed-up by the social benefits of having a respected status.
A middle–to-low-paid worker may try to relieve stress by resor-ting to physically destructive abuses of alcohol and drugs or gambling, all of which are a strain on financial resources. The executive, however, has financially sustainable habits and can when necessary afford discrete access to rehabilitative therapy.
Bottom-of-the-pile stress.
In the workplace as in any social structure or environment, stress passes down the chain of command until it accumulates at the bottom of the pile among those who have no one else to pass it on to and who have not the means to resolve it. Bottom-of-the-pile stress hits those who lack control in their working lives and who have no one to turn to or receive support from.
Studies have shown that it is mostly those people with good family, community and cultural support networks who fare better: they suffer fewer heart attacks and stress-related diseases than those who are isolated.
Work Stress can replay the stresses of our early years.
We may find we are once again being regimented, intimidated, talk-ed down to, constricted, bored and bullied. We may feel afraid to protest or show our vulnerability: in a ruthlessly competitive labour market we could be speedily replaced by somebody less irksome or more thick-skinned.
Making a stand against those who stress us means confronting not only the workplace prejudices and inefficiencies that surround us but also the inner pains and fears that were embedded in us early in our lives and that have laid down the patterns of our present sense of resignation.
Unmet needs and unexpressed feelings about them, combined with held frustration from educational systems that may have primed us for regimented, monotonous and meaningless work, will have imprinted long-term tensions into our bodies and minds. Held and reduced breathing augmented by muscular rigidity will have enabled us to hold in our feelings, endure the present and steel ourselves for a future which seems to be nothing but an endless prolongation of the past.
The future may have arrived in the form of the workplace – a similarly overwhelming system – and we submit to it now as then, using the same unconscious reflexes of reduced breathing and tensed muscles and feeling the same old feelings of inescapable resignation or simmering resentment.
Counselling & therapy can help us help ourselves with work stress.
Confiding in fellow-workers about our fears and griefs may invite ridicule and could have the effect of making us feel even more vulnerable.
An experienced Centre worker can assist us to release held emo-tions by providing a confidential opportunity to voice them and get them off our chest. Patterns of holding back responses – once self-protective but now increasingly self-defeating as our needs continue to go unmet – can be sensitively explored at our own pace. A skilled worker can give gentle encouragement to our inner self-healing powers as they arise. Stresses can then be released naturally and effectively and we can recover blocked energy with which to meet our work situations on more equal terms.