The first to arrive was a link to a recently posted Ted talk given by Kelly McGonigal in June of this year. (If you haven’t yet watched it then do as it’s a brilliant thought-provoking talk and really challenges our current attitudes towards stress.)
Kelly starts the talk by citing an eight year research study conducted in the US which concludes that people who experience high levels of stress AND who believe that stress is harmful for their health have a 43% increased chance of dying. And then equally shocking she went onto say that ‘people who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful for their health were no more likely to die, in fact they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study including people who had relatively little stress.'
The second was a cipd email linking to an article entitled ‘who are the UK’s most stressed workers?’ which reported the recent YouGov Big Work survey findings and stated that 64% of UK workers felt stressed by their job. Looking further into the survey it also showed that as a coping strategy for stress more than a third of workers (35%) turn to alcohol. It didn’t ask whether people believe that stress is harmful to their health but in light of Kelly McGonigal’s talk, perhaps it should!
Given that stress in the workplace is increasing, and in light of the research stated in Kelly McGonigal’s talk, should we be continuing to consider stress as the enemy and concentrate on strategies to ‘reduce’ ‘combat’ or ‘manage’ stress? Or should we instead focus on embracing stress as a part of modern business life, gain greater awareness of our body’s response to stress, and work with it rather than against it?
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