Stress takes its toll on health in the workplace
Every year 600,000 new people sign up for incapacity benefits and 1.4 million people aged 50-59 are already retired due to ill-health.
According to the 2010 CIPD Survey for Sickness Absence management, chronic pain and depression account for two-thirds of the long-term absences, with musculoskeletal injuries, back pain and stress accounting for most of the rest. When it comes to short-term absence, the most common causes are minor illnesses and then musculoskeletal injuries, back pain and stress.
Over a third of employers report that stress-related absence has increased over the past year, yet what is not widely recognised is that stress can also trigger all the above conditions.
Studies have shown that the symptoms produced by the triggering of nerve pathways by stress, provide an escape mechanism for the build-up of internal pressure. This actually is good news because if a condition is diagnosed as being a stress illness, then whether it is back pain, RSI or depression, it is reversible and therefore full recovery is possible. If that’s the case, then once people understand this and learn how to deal with the stress in their lives, health and wellbeing in the workplace would improve resulting in less sickness absence.
This would have the knock-on effect of reducing the stress of those people left to cope with the workload when colleagues are off sick. Our perception of how stressed we feel is not just based on what is happening, but how we interpret it and then deal with it. There’s no doubt that there is much more pressure on all of us from information overload via the media and computers, plus the demand for immediate response to any communication in the workplace and socially, such as social media forums, texts, phone calls, emails etc.
Most people rarely spend any time without some sort of distraction, even if that’s just the TV or radio or a computer. We are so used to the pace of lives these days that many of us don’t even recognise we are stressed, yet the “pressure cooker” of hidden stresses inside is building up steam.
With the highest level of unemployment since 1998, job uncertainty provides an easily understood form of stress when the threat of redundancy appears.
What is often missed though is the pressure on the survivors who remain in work and have to cope with a higher workload, organisational changes and restructuring, as well as the fear of losing their job at the next wave of redundancies. The need to work hard and perform well can cause extreme, ongoing stress yet there is very little research into the many employees who remain in work yet are suffering from conditions such as depression, neck pain, back pain and RSI, many of which may be triggered by stress.
If you are one of these people, here are my five top tips to help you deal with the pressure improve your own health and wellbeing.
At the end of each work day offload any feelings of frustration, anger etc by writing it down. Then try to gain some perspective and see what you might have learned from what has happened.
Once you have offloaded about it don’t allow yourself to then ruminate over it because this just stirs it all up again.
Take a lunch break! You will be much more productive in the afternoon if you remove yourself from the workplace.
If you feel yourself getting wound up about an email, in a meeting or with a colleague, take time out, even if it’s just hiding in the toilet for two minutes to calm down with slow deep breaths and counting to 10.
Try to spend at least 10 minutes each day without any distraction at all, preferably in a quiet, peaceful place.
Georgie Oldfield MCSP is a chartered physiotherapist and stress illness specialist based in Huddersfield and treats people throughout the UK and Europe. To download her free audio from.sirpauk.com or call her on 01484 452500.
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metrostress
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 10:37 AMI totally agree especially withe the "10 min without distraction" comment. My company offer short massage sessions at work across Greater Manchester and the Northwest giving employees that "down time" A number of our corporate clients, in the public and private sectors, have featured in the Sunday TImes "100 Best Companies to work for" showing that they do care about staff welfare in a real way. Our clients have reported higher motivation and reduced absenteeism as a result of this kind of intervention BEFORE stress levels build to an unmanageable state. Regards Bill Dove metrostress ltd
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