We all have many daily needs of our work, when are these requests greater than our personal resources?Or do we at least see it that way? We can feel stress at work.
This disorder has no negative effect on our psychological health, as long as it is punctual or for a short period of time, this is because people have adaptive mechanisms (adaptation strategies) that allow us to face challenges and demands.
- However.
- If the demands to which we submit over time.
- Promote an effect of exhaustion of stress and the resources that we have stop working because they are no longer adaptive.
- That is.
- The mind enters a phase of exhaustion that leads to the appearance.
- Of stress symptoms at work.
- The person is blocked and cannot initiate their coping strategies because their psychological system is burned.
It should be noted that the state of psychological exhaustion from work stress is very common in our society, about 60% of cases treated in therapy experience a very high level of work stress, as therapy progresses and the patient improves, It is necessary to work on strategies of management and stress management.
If stress management does not develop, the changes will not be sustained in the long term, as the effects of stress will return, so the patient’s clinical condition will be negative again. To raise awareness of this problem and try to prevent it, in this article we explain the 3 most dangerous effects of stress at work.
The effects of stress in the workplace range from minor concentration and memory problems to symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Among the most common effects of stress in the workplace are neuropsychological stress, the degree of impairment of cognitive functions, such as attention, reasoning, memory and stress-derived decision-making.
Now, why does stress affect mental functions?The reason is the constant performance of monitoring and control tasks over time by our mind, due to overload and the consequent need for control.
“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe. “- Marcus Aurelius-
Another effect of stress on work is the decrease in the ability to direct sustained care (concentration). Most of the time, when a person has a high level of stress at work, they get into the habit of performing multiple tasks at the same time. , using a work dynamic called multitasking.
Multitasking is very detrimental to our ability to concentrate, as it teaches us to function under various stimuli. When we want to focus attention on a single stimulus, the mind has a habit of “jumping” from one task to another. So while order is to focus on a single task, the strength of a habit like multitasking ends up winning the battle and we are constantly distracted.
At this stage it is very important to understand that attention is a process of capturing information in our psychological system, if you change the attention will always change the memory, that is, remember, you have to be careful: if the information does not enter our mind properly, it is very complicated that it is kept (memorized) correctly, so stress at work deteriorates memory due to difficulty of attention and concentration.
Stress makes our sympathetic nervous system constantly prepare us to run away or fight, even if stress is not a matter of life and death, our body secretes hormones such as cortisol (stress hormone), adrenaline and norepinephrine, hormones responsible for increased heart rate, alertness, sweating and breathing, among other functions.
So, if our body is constantly activated, the result of this cumulative activation will be anxiety. The constant concern associated with a number of future expectations leads to stress anxiety in the work environment that is maintained over time and accompanied by an agonizing sense of uncertainty and discomfort, which can occur. caused by chest depression, stomach pain and tachycardia.
Depressive symptoms are the result of a simple arithmetic rule: positive moments, negative moments, mood (joy or sadness). Stress in the workplace carries the backpack with negative moments. If we can’t or can’t change the balance of moments to the bright side, the experience may be: “I fight, I work hard, I stress and I have no time. pleasure. “
“Welfare and health are essential, otherwise we could not keep our minds strong and clear. -Bouddha-
In addition, stress causes us to secrete cortisol and high levels of this hormone are directly related to depression, it is not clear who causes what, but we know that depression and cortisol are directly and strongly related, therefore, if we add a high level of labor demand, the sense of urgency and the demand to perform tasks overload us , we don’t have time to load positive moments and we have high levels of cortisol, we have the perfect combination for depressive mood.
Finally, it is very important to understand that the most dangerous effects of work stress that we explained in this article appear in the order we mentioned, that is, there are problems of concentration and memory, then anxiety and depressive symptoms.
That’s why it’s very important to learn how to manage stress at work, whether you try and fail, or don’t know how, consult a psychologist, psychologists have a multitude of tools to maximize your performance and minimize stress.