Find the Root of Work Stress by Assessing Your Ideals
There is no working person among us who does not cope with stress – whether you are an entrepreneur, freelancer, working in a struggling startup or working for a company, stress at work is inevitable. But where does this stress come from and how to deal with it?
This post was originally published on the Zen Habits site .
Most stress relieving guides will suggest some actions for you: exercise, sleep well, eat right, meditate, and do yoga at your desk. These are all awesome and you should do them.
However, I’m more interested in the causes of stress. Dig, find out the cause, and work directly with it, rather than treating the symptoms. Only by understanding the cause of stress can you truly become its master.
The root cause of stress
Let’s take a look at some of the things that can make you stressful at work:
- Tough deadlines
- Difficult coworkers or boss
- Uncertainty about your job
- Uncertainty about whether you will succeed in this project
- Competition, office politics, interpersonal conflicts
- Not enough time for family or personal life
- Being overwhelmed by too much of a thing
There are many more possibilities, but this is a good selection. In all of these examples, the reason is the same:
We are attached to how we want everything to be . We have an ideal about what each of these situations should be, and our clinging to that ideal is stressful.
Take job insecurity. Of course, this is not ideal, we would rather have a stable job that we don’t have to worry about. So, reality doesn’t match our ideal (stable job), and this causes us stress. We don’t like the current situation, and this reluctance to be uncertain makes us nervous.
The same is true for each of the examples above – when a colleague doesn’t live up to our ideal, when we have an ideal that we don’t have to do too much, when our ideal of having easy-to-meet deadlines doesn’t fit if we’re not greeted, we get nervous. … Unfortunately, this happens all day long, every day. Our ideals about reality are constantly not being followed, and therefore we worry. It accumulates. This becomes a health problem.
So how do you deal with this? Let’s take a look.
Dealing with the cause of stress
If our attachment to the ideal is the cause of our stress, can we just not have ideals? Well, maybe that would be perfect, but no, I find it impossible not to have ideals. Ideals spontaneously resurface in our active and always hopeful minds.
To deal with the cause of stress, you need to 1) notice that you are feeling stressed or frustrated, 2) consciously notice your attachment to the ideal, and 3) weaken the attachment by finding appreciation for the actual reality of the present moment. …
Let’s take a look at them one by one.
First, you must notice stress . Learn to see your frustration or anxiety about something as a signpost, a flag that tells you what’s going on. So stress becomes a positive thing because it lets you know that something is happening. It’s like the notification system on your phone – instead of ignoring notifications like we usually do (we don’t like thinking about stress), we can deliberately dive into ourselves and deal with it.
Then you must carefully note your attachment to the ideal. This means that I looked in and said, “Hey, everything is not up to my ideal, and this annoys me – what is my ideal?” It is probably something safer, more stable, comfortable and controllable than what you are currently experiencing. For example, if you are overwhelmed with too much work, your ideal is probably to have a very controlled, comfortable amount of work, and to be on top of it all. It would be much safer, more stable, more convenient for you.
Unfortunately, comfort, control and safety are not what life gives us. Basically, it gives us the exact opposite – something chaotic, unpredictable, uncomfortable, unstable. And we can get upset about it, or we can accept it. We can hate it all in life, or we can love it. It’s a choice.
Finally, we can loosen our attachment to this expectation or ideal. We can say, “This ideal does not help me. This clinging to desire is actually hurting me. By doing this, I open up many more opportunities for myself. “
This means that we can be open to an imperfect employee who is imperfect and struggles with their own problems. We can be open to loving too much work, more than we can do, and we need to prioritize and just focus on the things that are important for the moment. We can be open to the possibility that we will perform poorly or lose our jobs, because even then we figure something out and life will be fine.
Weakening our attachments means realizing that life should not be one path, our path, that we can be open to this path. It’s about learning to love everything, shit and all. It’s about taking an interest in life, in others, instead of judging life and other people as bad.
And then it’s about working from this peaceful place. Too much to do? Pick one problem and try to solve it. Have an annoying colleague? Find empathy for her difficulties, show curiosity about what she is going through, and empathize and empathize with her about your conflict with her. Afraid of losing your job? Focus on doing your best while preparing for the fact that you may need to find another job.
Many people will not like this solution because it means that they are not achieving their desired ideals. Most of us want to manage life so that it is the way we want it. And that’s ok if it works for you.
I propose to be open to many other possibilities, open your heart to what life has to offer, not what you want, be curious about what is really in front of you, not condemn, and learn to accept everything as it is.
Find the Root of Stress at Work | Zen habits