Work-related stress is a growing concern around the world.

Below are some of the fortune 500 companies that has stress reduction programs at their work place;

Goldman Sachs, Google, Apple, Nike…

The American Institute of Stress found that 75% of employees believe they have more on the job stress than a generation ago. While 1 in 4 employees view their job as the number one stressor in their lives.

Within the organization, the social and managerial aspects of work can be stressful. Eventually and inevitably this stress leads to frustration at the work place and there is a clear link between frustration and aggression.

 

It seems to be hard-wired into people that if a situation keeps frustrating us, we may move into 'aggressive mode', giving us access to extra reserves of strength and motivation. Thousands of years ago, the frustration - aggression link probably helped our ancestors fight wild animals, catch food, and solve many other Stone Age problems. Unfortunately, the world in which we live and our work places require careful action more often than brute force, but we still carry within us this primitive problem-solving system.

 

Therefore, it is of utmost importance to find effective and result oriented techniques to manage & reduce workplace related stress.

Let us try to understand stress in a more root cause orient analysis.

 

Q: When you go on a holiday near a beach, or on a mountain why do feel relaxed? Is it only because of the spectacular view of nature?  or is there something else to it?

Workplace stress or any kind of stress for that matter, has a direct relationship with number of thoughts that comes to your mind at a given time.

When there is unfinished work, tight deadlines, lack of resources, arguments with colleagues, irritations……these conditions or states of mind generally trigger lot of thoughts than usual. And most of the time they are uncontrollable, boiling up more and more as you try to control them and try to concentrate.  This is what we call as Stress.

On the other hand positive states of the mind such as love and kindness trigger less number of thoughts. Same happened when you find your self on a beach or on top of a mountain. The beauty, the oneness of nature triggered less number of thoughts. The usual thoughts of your problems naturally did nor arise. This created a calm relaxed mind.

So whenever you have less number of thoughts, less number of unnecessary thoughts you are relaxed.

Not the thoughts that are necessary to deal with a work place situation, but all the rest of it, that are unnecessary and that keep boiling up uncontrollably, if you can avoid those….now you are more relaxed. Not because your problems were solved, but your mind now deals with only the wanted thoughts. You think what you want to think.

The beach, the mountain helped you in a way to achieve this.

So the bottom line is; your workplace stress is directly proportional to the number of thoughts triggering in your mind.

Now unfortunately you can’t always have the beach or the mountain top at your workplace. Even if you can they are effective only in the short term. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to find a technique that is effective meaning result oriented and is long lasting.

Conventionally people rely on medicines or chemical related substances to manage the workplace stress if it comes to that.

But according to an article published on nzherald.co.nz, 22nd Sept 2019; “A study has revealed that UK's most commonly-prescribed antidepressant "barely works". Scientists from University College London said they were "shocked" with the discovery.”

 

Stress Vs Population Curve:

If we now try to understand this on a graphical manner, in a normal distribution curve of stress vs population, most employees and most people in general for that matter, are at the center of the normal distribution curve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whenever they feel stress, they move to the right-hand side of the curve. At this moment conventional methods such as holidaying or taking a break will take them back to the populated center of the curve.

Unfortunately, most don’t even realize that there is an extremely relaxed state far more to the left- side of the curve. Since the conventional methods will not yield effective practical results to achieve this state.

So most employees will be at the ‘OK’ state, which vastly restricts their potential.

This is one of the reasons that fortune 500 companies are exploring different techniques at their workplaces to effectively manage & reduce stress with different techniques.

There are numerous examples of more and more companies employing different options that uses mindfulness, music, sound therapy, etc. to address workplace stress at their companies.

Institutes such as ‘Nisala’ (nisala.org) based in Sri Lanka, a center for energy and consciousness studies, is such a place providing teachings directly addressing the concept of getting relaxed by reducing the number of thoughts.

In conclusion workplace stress management & reduction is of timely importance for any organization and to a society. It is important that individuals and companies invest their time to find an effective result-oriented process to manage it, as it directly influences the potential and performance of the organization.