4 stress causes and how to deal with them

In the early years of my IT career, I was experiencing some chest pain and heart palpitations. These symptoms weren't worrying me deeply, but I decided to check them with a cardiologist. This was part of our conversation:

Doctor: Your company sends me many clients. Your job is highly stressful.

Me: Is it? If I make a mistake, a program may not work. If you make one, someone may die. How can my profession be more stressful?

He didn't know why, either. But then, I accepted that stress can come from unpredictable places.

We are exposed to stressful situations daily, and how we deal with them defines a significant portion of our mood and happiness.

There are 2 main lines about dealing with stress (Management and Avoidance), and we will see some examples and tools you can use daily.

Stress management vs stress avoidance

These are the main strategies to deal with stress:

• Stress Management: This is the preferred way in the books. It involves changing our reactions (feelings, sensations, etc.) when confronting a difficult situation. This is "How we accept" the frustrations that we have. Imagine you helped someone at work solve an issue, but then he takes the credit. Your ability to stay calm in that situation is stress management. You received the stressful input, but you are handling it without suffering.
• Stress Avoidance: Here, the idea is to avoid stressful situations. So, in our example, you wouldn't help your coworker to prevent the possibility of solving the issue without receiving the credit. The problem with this is that by avoiding the situations, we miss the chance to gain resilience and refrain from doing activities we would like to do.

Although the definitions are clear, certain actions or strategies lie in between:

In our example, you could tell your colleague that you expected to receive some credit for the work done together. This would reduce the chances of happening again.

I call this strategy Proactive Stress Avoidance. You try to change and adapt the activities so you reduce your frustration. You are avoiding the stress but also doing what you like. We are focusing on these strategies in this article.

Causes

Stress comes from many sources. Physical environment, people, type of work, workload, performance evaluation, etc.

Some examples are:

• Excess of work: There is a misconception here. Having a lot of work is not an issue for most people. You may have 200 tasks to do. But as far as you can take them one by one in a specific sequence with adequate time for completing each of them, you'll be fine. The problem here comes when you have many tasks to do with impossible deadlines, when the priorities are unclear, or when you need to hop from activity to activity.
• Inadequate activities: Having either tasks that are not challenging enough or tasks you can't perform.
• Difficulty finding focus: Sometimes, I begin my day with 3 tasks on my list and end it with 7—the initial 3 and 4 more. Not to mention that I spent the whole day working. But working on others' objectives, working on "urgent" tasks that appeared, or working in chunks in my activities without achieving anything.
• Activities out of your control: This is the frustration about activities you can't do because of dependences on others or teams you can't control. For example, you must finish a report, but the system is down or lagging.

The causes vary from person to person. Not everyone gets frustrated by the same situations.

How to deal with them

The first step is always recognizing what is making you uncomfortable. Once you identified it, here are some tools you can use.

Excess of work

If you set the deadlines and realize they are short, increase them. Gather data to justify the increase. Remember that you have other activities going on.

If the deadlines are imposed, speak up. Explain that it is impossible or ask for conditions to make it possible.

If the activities are messed up, stop to straighten them. Organize and sequentialize them. Ask for priorities.

The key here is to align expectations.

Inadequate activities

Ask for more if you need it. Don't be gluttonous and ask more than you can handle.

Similarly, if you are overwhelmed with complex activities (out of your capacity), ask your manager to take them away from you or help you accomplish them (with support, training, or time).

Many people struggle to ask for help or turn down activities because they think they are showing weakness. But it is the opposite. This is how you show strength and that you know what you are capable of doing.

Difficulty finding focus

If you are like me, you don't like being bothered while in the middle of something. You don't want to be called or pinged over the messenger. So, turn it off.

Create a few buckets over the day when you don't want to be disturbed. Make it clear in your calendar, and outside those periods, return every email and chat you received while disconnected.

Divide your day into 2 parts: your planned work and the messy/other's work. Set your deadlines and expectations accordingly.

Activities out of your control

The keys here are: Make it clear in advance that you have dependencies, escalate when they don't deliver, expose (professionally) that their delays are causing issues on your side, and ask for compromises to reduce the impact.

To get there, you need to translate the impact of your activity into the impact on the Business. No one cares whether you accomplish your compromises, but if you frame it in terms of Business interests, you will get the required support.

Wrapping up

The steps are simple but not easy:

• Understand what bothers you
• Find out how you would like it to be
• Adapt it, speak up, or both.

You will improve your workplace in this way. Many of these things seem scary, but the benefits you will get from them are huge.

Thanks for reading, and let me know about your experience.