Stress Management
Sure you should eat well and exercise, but stress management in the workplace often requires more than oranges and jumping jacks.
Stress is always going to exist in workplaces. In fact, it is necessary for us to perform at our best. We need to have a sufficient level of stress to make things exciting, but not so much as to exhaust us. While we would like to have exactly the right amount of stress every day, this is not likely to be your reality.
This session provides general information about managing our own mental health and stress in the workplace. We provide practical strategies to better manage stress as well as to reduce the impact that comes from being around others or environments that are stressful to help build resilience. This session also touches on when stress leads to, or exacerbates a mental health condition and ways to cope.
We teach participants to use a cognitive-behavioural approach to stress management, which means that if you can control your thoughts about workplace stressors, you can control the physiological responses as well. This means that instead of spending the majority of your day in the “fight or flight” response which elevates blood pressure and releases harmful stress hormones or chemicals , we can learn to choose healthier responses to at least some of those things that may be outside of our control.
For those employees who are also dealing with mental health issues such as depression or anxiety, finding relief from stressors is much more complicated. While appropriate treatment by qualified health providers is of primary importance, we can help the work situation by working with employees to develop personal plans that allow them to stay productive during times of illness and recovery. Our experience in working with hundreds of employees experiencing mental health issues has provided us with a multitude of ideas and strategies that have worked.
The stress management skills participants will learn include the ability to:
- Identify his/her own triggers and stressors.
- Implement strategies that can reduce negative stress.
- Recognize when someone else may have been triggered.
- Respond more effectively to negativity.
For general employee stress management, or for specific employee situations, contact us today to see how we can help.