Is Stress Affecting Your Performance

Stress is associated with negative feelings and negative effects on our life and emotions. In most work situations, stress can cause poor performance and lower our productivity. The response to stress in the workplace will control our success or failure at the job site. It is difficult to deal with problems in the workplace. It may mean a boss that is unreasonable, a co-worker who causes problems, or guidelines or deadlines that are unreasonable. We may deal with stress at work by being passive and withdrawn. We may think the stress will go away if it is ignored. Many times, people realize that this approach is not healthy.

It can work against you if you are too aggressive in response to stress at work. Being aggressive can harm interoffice relationships. They are too complex for them not to be harmed by an aggressive reaction to stress in the workplace. If you are not able to deal with stress at work, it can cause depression, panic and anxiety attacks, and physical health problems. Stress can negatively affect our work performance. We may feel we are unable to cope with even the simplest of details about our jobs.

To help us understand the relationship between stress and performance we need to look at what increases performance. We can increase our work performance if we have an important deadline to meet and that keeps us focused on performing the actions that will get that task done. It can be used as a positive approach to making the job more interesting and enjoyable. If we didn't have deadlines, we might never finish a task that might not be as pleasurable as another one. Deadlines can motivate people who are bored to finish an unpleasant chore.

Athletes are a good example of positive responses to stress. An athlete facing elimination in a tournament situation may need that extra adrenalin boost to power up their performance. The "flight or fight" response can give them what they need to push through pain and win the game.

Negative responses come from stress that bosses or management put on employees when expectations are unreasonable. Stress can affect the performance of a team or group when criticism is directed to the entire group instead of the one person who may have caused the problem. When the group is addressed instead of the individual, more stress and negative feelings are produced and work performance begins to fall. Negative feelings and stress will create discontent, more sick time being used, and less over-all productivity by the entire group. Pressure can disrupt our performance because we lack the attention needed to do the work.

Negative thoughts can crowd our mind an overload our brain. The brain has so many items to look at it is unable to process everything. We have enormous capacity to process items through our brain, but we are only aware of just a few thoughts at a time. Our brain has a huge capacity, but we have a limited amount of attention capacity. Decision-making is affected and performance suffers.

Next article: Biofeedback And Massage - Two Helpful Methods To Reduce Stress

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