CBT for Career Success: A Self-Help Guide by Steve Sheward

Author:Steve Sheward [Sheward, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317542841
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Using cognitive and behavioural approaches to succeed in the workplace

Stress-busting at work

According to the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE, 2014), the total number of working days lost due to work-related stress, depression or anxiety was 11.3 million in 2013–2014, an average of 23 days per case of stress, depression or anxiety. The main activities that the HSE survey found as causing work-related stress, depression or anxiety were

•Workload pressures, including scheduling and shift work

•Interpersonal relationships, including difficulties with superiors, bullying or harassment

•Changes in the workplace, including reductions in resources, staffing levels and additional responsibilities for staff

Does all of this sound familiar to you? With an increasingly competitive global economy, it’s a fairly safe bet that stress in the workplace will be with us for the foreseeable future. But what exactly is work-related stress? The HSE defines it as ‘a harmful reaction that people have to undue pressures and demands placed upon them at work’.

I want you to pay particular attention to one word in the above sentence: reaction. You could survey a hundred different people who had exactly the same pressures and demands placed upon them and all of them could react in different ways depending on how they thought about their particular situation. Controversially, the psychologist Graham Price (2013) asserts that British adults are experiencing higher levels of stress than their grandparents, who had bombs rained upon them in the Blitz during the Second World War, and attributes this tendency to modern-day self-obsession rather than ‘grit’ and ‘Dunkirk spirit’. Angela Patmore, author of The Truth About Stress (2006), suggests that the condition has given rise to a multi-billion pound and dollar industry dedicated to curing people of this new modern ‘disease’, and finds this approach very dubious.

Whether or not you subscribe to Price and Patmore’s views on stress, it’s worth reflecting on the subjective nature of this condition. Stress is a reaction to an external event, something that happens to us in the workplace or elsewhere. The way we think about this event will largely determine how we feel and act in response to the stressor: anxious and avoidant or excited and galvanised into action. Let’s look at an example.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.