Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques

Archive for August, 2009

Stress Management: Dealing With Crisis

Dealing with a crisis can be a very stressful experience. It can either lead one to suffer from some personal trauma or have the means to go over the whole experience and come out a better person. Stress management during a crisis requires knowing how to take hold of the situation before it takes its hold on you.

One of the important ways to effectively deal with a crisis is to try and keep hope alive even though things are showing that there seems nothing left. Stress and anguish usually follow a person through a crisis especially after he or she gives up hope. And when a person gives up any hope, it can become pretty difficult to handle the stress and assume any control to the ensuing problems that a crisis may bring. Although most people may think that finding any hope in a hopeless situation such as a crisis is a gift that not all may be blessed of having, it can otherwise be learned and practiced. All it takes is having the ability to look upon a situation in a more objective manner.

One of the first thing to do in a crisis situation is to try and assess its degree of magnitude. By looking at the problem from the point of how it will affect you, you try to assess the situation and try to look upon things that you have no control over and separate them from the things that you still can assume control. Doing so will help you look upon a crisis as a situation where you may still be able to do something. Looking at a crisis that way can help provide some encouragement that you may not be as helpless as you first thought.

Not that you have looked over and assessed a certain crisis that you are in, you then try to take note of the things that you still have control over. The next thing to do when in a crisis is to make use of situations that you still may have control over and work on those instead of trying to wrestle with circumstances that you cannot control. In order to deal with a crisis situation, it is important that you try to accept the fact that there are just some things that you cannot change. What you can do is to focus on those things that you still have a chance of respond to positively and still have control over. This will help you rebuild some confidence by building up some sense of control even in a crisis situation.

In trying to handle a difficult crisis, one way to avoid creating further stress and anxiety is to try and separate things in your life that are affected by the crisis from those that are not. There might be some areas of your life that a current crisis would not affect in any way. Having the ability to avoid letting these areas be affected by a crisis not only helps keep the crisis isolated, it also helps make the crisis situation looked smaller than you may think it is.

By making a crisis affect the whole of your life, you run the risk of letting it try to engulf you, creating a massive problem out of something that may not really look that overwhelming in the first place. It can be quite a big stress management problem.

And what’s more, having a certain area of your life that remains unaffected by the crisis can still provide you a dose of sanity to a life already troubled.

Change in the Workplace Stress Management

Workplace stress management can already be quite a task just to maintain employee productivity, efficiency as well as satisfaction. Nothing can be more stressful for managers than  to handle stress brought about by workplace change. Change can affect the workplace in many ways, with the negative side of it always bringing along considerable stress to some.

Workplace change is usually inevitable in the business world. Changes in the economy and the competitiveness between businesses can bring about certain changes in the workplace when most may least expect it. Businesses always run the risk of having to stage lay-offs, personnel downsizing and even bankruptcy. And when these changes happen, the employees of the affected businesses go through quite a stressful situation having to deal with unemployment and an uncertain future. The management even has the more stressful task to inform employees about it.

It is important for management to try to break the news of a workplace change in a less abrupt manner as possible. Communication would be very important in this case. Effective and timely communication may help affected employees better understand and accept such upsetting and stressful news.

One of the best ways to communicate massive changes in the workplace is to involve key communicators to bring the news to the employees. While it may sound logical to have  the CEO speak to the entire group of working personnel in a company-wide meeting, he or she alone may not be able to give the details more effectively on all levels. The CEO of the company alone may not be able to satisfy employee questions and concerns.

Having other people such as supervisors or team leaders to handle the job of communicating any workplace change would surely be more efficient and effective. By having the company’s front-line supervisors and maybe team leaders address employees under them and answer their questions, this helps  communicating change more efficiently accessible to more employees and may take less time to make them understand and accept the unfortunate news.

But aside from having several people handling the stressful news of change to company staff. It is also as important for the management to create an effective message. And since companies are comprised of different departments and levels, the message of change should be designed to cater to the information needed of these different levels. In short, the message should cater and fit to a specific audience in order to be more effective and hence avoid possible confusion as well as additional stress.

Effective communication of change in the workplace means that information required by different levels of the company should be satisfied. Others may stop at citing the reasons why change is a good idea for the company. Other companies may only try to communicate only what the changes affect the corporate level.

Neglect on providing information that really matter to employees, such as how the change may affect their future in the company, can really add considerable stress and many sleepless nights to many people.

That is not considered as good workplace stress management for a company that is in the midst of undergoing changes.