Coping skills key to management of workplace stress

When it comes to handling workplace stress, Neila Booth, an employee at Tammi’s Flowers, Cards, and Gifts, and Jennifer Harvie, who handles web promotion and design here at the Times, just might be ahead of the game.
That’s because they already use some of the coping skills being promoted during “Mental Health Week.” Running May 3-9 and sponsored by the Canadian Mental Health Association, this year’s theme is “Reducing Stress in the Workplace.”
Instead of looking at flower arrangement deadlines and a long lineup of customers as a stress-inducer, Booth keeps her cool through teamwork and laughter.
“Sometimes things go crazy but everybody pitches in and helps out,” she noted Monday. “At times we have to work longer hours but we just shut the door and do lots of laughing.
“There’s no sense in getting stressed out about it,” she reasoned.
Harvie, on the other hand, takes charge of workplace stress by getting active.
“I exercise in the morning to organize my day and at night to de-compress and help organize the next day,” she noted earlier this week.
Two important elements of the work environment can influence stress–the job demands on a worker and the amount of control a worker has over meeting those demands, a CMHA report on Mental Health in the Workplace states.
Workplace stress also can result from lack of social support, personal conflicts, lack of communication, fear of job loss, overwork, monotony, deadlines, quotas, racism, and lack of respect and value for employees.
Although stress and tension are normal reactions to events that threaten us, it’s how we internalize these pressures that counts, said Jon Thompson, director at Riverside Community Counselling Services here.
“We all need stress to live and it isn’t a bad thing,” he noted yesterday. “It’s how we deal with it that makes it okay or not okay.”
“Stress is a life-saving process that we have from the moment of birth so you don’t want to get rid of it,” echoed Dr. Lucille Peszat of the Canadian Centre for Stress Management in Toronto.
“There’s only one kind of person that has no stress and they’re dead,” she added.
The centre helps people and organizations deal more effectively with stress and the pressures of change, work, management, life, or illness.
Dr. Peszat said there are three types of stress–distress or bad stress, neutral stress (the kind our bodies go through to keep living), and eustress or positive stress.
“Eustress is the ability to be able to master your surroundings to meet your situation and not enough of us know how to do that,” she reasoned.
One of the foremost ways to be empowered in a stressful situation at work is to change the way you look at it. Giving yourself that positive edge lessens the chance of internalizing a negative response.
“Sometimes the wisest person is the one who knows when not to talk and what not to say,” she explained. “Belly laughter is a very good technique as well because it releases endorphins that give you the same high as taking morphine.”
But if you do get “stressed out” and succumb to the by-product of anger, work it out, write it out, or clean it out, urged Dr. Peszat.
“It’s not a nice emotion and when it is internalized, we then become walking volcanoes and often blow up totally out of proportion [to the situation],” she said.
Meanwhile, Thompson urged employers to make an effort at reducing workplace stress by initiating wellness programs, random acts of kindness, humour, teamwork, and, if necessary, mediation to resolve stress issues.
“Even have a mental health day where you recognize the hard work of an employee by giving them the afternoon off,” he suggested. “You will get that back in spades.”
Thompson said he helps reduce workplace stress by occasionally donning a pair of green “Spock” ears and wandering down the office hallway. He also seized the opportunity during “Mental Health Week” to courteously interrupt a meeting at the hospital to deliver a balloon.
“I told everyone at the meeting I was the ‘blues-buster,’” he said. “It took 30 seconds but I got everyone bouncing the balloon around [the table].
“[The ears] get people laughing in the office and that gets tension released,” he chuckled. “Sometimes we have to practise what we preach.”