Avoid the Effects of Stress on Your Work
Stress takes its toll in so many ways. It affects your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships, emotions and finances. If you’re like many people, coping with the stressors that invade your serenity each day often have their own consequences. Using drugs and alcohol to cope or relying on spending, gambling and overeating to ease the discomfort of stress just end up causing even more problems — and additional stress. It’s a spiral that just leads down.
When the place you spend the majority of your time is the main source of your stress, you may be headed for a major burnout episode if you don’t deal with it. According to the American Institute of Stress, “83 percent of U.S. workers suffer from work-related stress.” And the effects of stress on your work extend far beyond your own personal consequences:
- Workplace stress causes about one million people to miss work every day
- Businesses lose roughly $300 billion annually due to stress on the job
- Depression is one of the main effects of stress and the cause of those missed days, accounting for about $51 billion from absenteeism and another $26 billion for treatment
- Nearly 120,000 deaths are attributed to workplace stress every year
- About $190 billion in healthcare is spent on treating on-the-job, stress-related conditions
- Less than half of all employees believe that their employers even care
More Effects of Stress on Your Work
Work-related stress is understandable, especially when you’re a web developer, internet content provider or project manager. The flurry of changes you’re expected to deal with on a daily basis is dizzying:
- Tight deadlines with no room for mistakes
- Delays of others that impact your ability to complete your job
- Unreasonable customers who keep changing their minds
- Demanding bosses who don’t seem willing to give you the support you need
- Rapidly changing technology and algorithms that affect every project
- Competition only too willing to undercut your efforts
And if you happen to be the owner of a small content or tech company, you bring your own set of perfectly realistic stressors to work on a daily basis:
- Slow paying clients
- Demanding workers
- Employee turnover (especially in a wide-open job market)
- Personal finances
- Slow periods
- Pressures when all the jobs come in at once
Dealing with Stress at Work
In an ideal world, you can offset daily stress with a work-life balancing act that includes nutrition, exercise, fun and love. But it’s not an ideal world. To keep the effects of stress on your work to a minimum, you need to develop a new set of tips and tactics before you:
- Blow up and quit
- Fire everyone around you and end up doing all the work alone
- Make so many mistakes that you lose clients
- Tell off an important client in the heat of a moment
Every nuanced trick to deal with the effects of stress on your work won’t be effective for you personally. But a few tactics will work, allowing you to chill out and remember why you started your own business in the first place or why you went into the world of web design, web development or digital marketing. It’s OK to pick and choose or mix and match. Just do something to stop the madness that stress creates, such as:
- Always sleep on important decisions. Decisions made under duress or when you feel the tension of a stress headache coming on rarely lead to the best choices.
- Unplug at least one day every other week (or more). That means letting everything wait. By putting work in its place, you realize that while it’s important, your life and happiness rate just as high as any subjective deadline.
- Make lists to prioritize tasks that must be done today versus those items that can wait. As you go through your day, check off items that you’ve accomplished. Do one thing at a time and you may find that you suddenly have more time available! You can be productive when you’re focused and not rushed.
- Treat yourself and your employees after every success. It’s easy to rush from one project to the next without celebrating the victories. And soon enough, that win gets lost in the shuffle of the next stressor.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words that empower your business to succeed. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters, and more, with cross-links and thorough internet research.
