Importance of Stress-Resilience

This bottle brush tree is flourishing in a hostile arid environment because it’s stress-resistant. Likewise, modern workers struggle to thrive in significantly stressful and unhealthy workplaces. They too need to be resistant to stress. Stress resilience is the ability to prevent, mitigate, and/or relieve stress. Prevention is ideal, although, rarely possible. This is why stress resilience matters. This article covers how to empower staff to be stress-resilient. (Also see my post on workplace policies as simple ways to Reduce Virtual Workplace Overwhelm.)

The Current State of Workplace Stress

According to the University of Massachusetts, workplace stress costs American businesses an estimated $300 billion annually in health costs, absenteeism, and poor performance. More specifically, stress is responsible for forty percent of job turnover. Business News Daily reports that two-thirds of employees have difficulty focusing on work due to stress. They further state, that it’s responsible for approximately 16 percent of co-workers’ and supervisors’ issues and 21 percent of errors and missed deadlines. Even more astonishing are Bizwomen’s published results of a 2020 (pandemic) survey.  Nine out of ten respondents claimed to have experienced burnout and practiced unhealthy work habits such as working late-night hours and extra days per week.

The intransigence of US business culture toward this toxic environment is astounding and indecent (see also my blog posts Trouble in the Office and Regular Sleep and Your Company’s Bottom Line). Clearly, the situation begs for changes in work structure, culture, and policies. Unfortunately, efforts to date have mostly focused on serious symptoms, i.e., a series of health issues. Not surprisingly, they’ve had limited impact or success. Thus, employees desperately need their own strategies and tools to empower themselves and build their own personal stress resilience. An accessible approach is based on knowledge and awareness, breath, and pause.

Building Stress Resilience

The Power of Knowledge

Not everyone responds to the same stressors and in the same way. To effectively identify and address stress, each person has to become aware of it and her/his own progressive stress signals. Many people can list their physical symptoms, but not mental symptoms. Yet, these are more common. They present sooner and are less often acknowledged or attended to.

Unfortunately, few people are familiar with the details of the full human stress response. Nor are they aware of the numerous changes the mind undergoes under stress. For example, it becomes hyper-focused, inflexible, stuck on unoriginal and circular thinking, anxious, and/or disengaged. This is not the right state of mind to be in for creative thinking, clear perception, and decision-making.

Knowledge and self-awareness are powerful tools. Understanding the dynamics of stress and being aware of stressors and reactions is valuable information that can help a person maintain stress vigilance and manage her/his personal state and surroundings. See my workshop Tap Into Inner Wisdom to Access Full Intelligence for more on developing inner awareness.

The Power of Breath

Prana, breath, is both the physical act of breathing in air and the essence of life. Using the breath for healing and altering states of the body and mind has multiple origins and dates back at least 5,000 years: most likely much longer. In the 1960s, modern non-native Americans began to experiment with breathwork and meditation. Now the internet is replete with information on breathing techniques for a wide variety of applications in health, wellness, spirituality, sexuality, etc.

Today, ample evidence within science and health practices supports the claim that specific breathing techniques can tone the nervous system and reduce stress. In fact, breathing in certain ways can ground and center a person, even someone who is agitated or hyperaroused. It can clear and focus the mind. Learning and practicing simple and quick stress resilience practices based on breathing patterns can help reset the body and mind’s stress response. In most tense or stressful work circumstances, just a few breaths can reestablish balance, and a clear perspective, and create an opportunity to choose a response. This is possible with knowledge, breath, and a pause. (For more, see my blog post How to Empower Staff Deal With Stress On the Spot.)

The Power of the Gap

More empowered and appropriate responses arise from a state of clear environmental and self-awareness. Except in situations where immediate action is needed, given pause, a person has the chance to check perceptions, reflect, and decide on the best response or action. But, a person who is stressed has difficulty taking a pause because stress promotes reactivity and hyperactivity.

Learning tricks to create the gap such as taking a breath or pinching a finger helps shift a person from reactivity to more reflective action. These tricks may seem trivial. Yet, they aren’t. That’s because, adoption of such behaviors requires clear intent, reminders, and habituation.

With knowledge, breath, and pause managers and staff are empowered to be stress-resilient.

Interested In Empowering Your Staff To Be Stress-Resilient? See:

• My workshop, Stress Resilience in the Workplace, and other staff development workshops. I offer virtual and in-person options and can schedule outside normal US Eastern Time business hours for overseas clients.
• Coaching in the workplace services for leaders, mid-level managers, and other staff members.
• My best-guided meditations related to stress resilience are Relax, Ground, and Clear as well as Getting Into the Body. The latter helps the listener scan and become aware of internal (embodied) senses, which is helpful to attune to early subtler stress responses. All of my meditations are FREE and downloadable.

Or, Contact Me