Survival Stress Environmental and Job Stresses

Internally Generated Stress & Anxiety

Your personality can affect the way in which you experience stress. You may be familiar with the idea of 'type A' personalities who thrive on stress, and 'type B' personalities who are mellower and more relaxed in their approach.

Stress can cause the levels of a neurotransmitter called noradrenalin to rise. This can give a feeling of confidence and elation that type As like. They can therefore subconsciously defer work until the last minute to create a 'deadline high', or can create a stressful environment at work that feeds their enjoyment of a situation. The downside of this is that they may leave jobs so late that they fail when an unexpected crisis occurs. This may also cause unnecessary stress for other colleagues who are already under a high level of stress.

Other aspects of personality can cause stress. Examples are:

  • perfectionism, where the perfectionist's extremely or impossibly high standards can cause stress
  • excessive self-effacement, where constant attention to the needs of others can lead to dissatisfaction when no-one looks after your needs, and
  • anxiety.

Anxiety

Anxiety occurs where you are concerned that circumstances are out of control. In some cases being anxious and worrying over a problem may generate a solution. Normally it will just result in negative thinking.

Albert Ellis listed the five main unrealistic desires or beliefs that cause anxiety:

  • The desire always to have the love and admiration of all people important to you. This is unrealistic because you have no control over other people's minds. They can have bad days, see things in odd ways, make mistakes or can be plain disagreeable and awkward.
  • The desire to be thoroughly competent at all times. This is unrealistic because you only achieve competence at a new level by making mistakes. Everybody has bad days and makes mistakes.
  • The belief that external factors cause all misfortune. Often negative events can be caused by your own negative attitudes. Similarly your own negative attitudes can cause you to view neutral events negatively. Someone else might find something positive in something you view as a problem.
  • The desire that events should always turn out the way that you want them to, and that people should always do what you want. Other people have their own agendas and do what they want to do.
  • The belief that past bad experience will inevitably control what will happen in the future. You can very often improve or change things if you try hard enough or look at things in a different way.

Highly Recommended Books

For an excellent book on stress management, try The Book of Stress Survival - How to Relax and Live Positively by Alix Kirsta. This is a very pleasant, well-presented, sensible approach to stress management. It covers many important areas completely ignored by most other books.

Survival Stress Environmental and Job Stresses

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