As a lab professional, your days are spent ensuring the health of others. But, is your job a danger to your health?
That is the question put forward by Dr. David Posen. He is a family physician specializing in stress management and author of Is Work Killing You?: A Doctor’s Prescription for Treating Workplace Stress. When asked about the typical causes of workplace stress, Dr. Posen refers to ‘The Big Three’: Volume, Velocity and Abuse. The volume of work has increased in our workplace largely due to downsizing. This is evident in the common phrase ‘doing more with less’. The velocity of work refers to the increasing pace of the workplace.
“Everyone wants things done more quickly,” explains Dr. Posen. “Increased expectations and unrealistic deadlines are commonplace.” Abuse is a term Dr. Posen most commonly associates with interpersonal conflict and tension but he also sees many instances of outright harassment and bullying in the workplace. These three causes of workplace stress are common in all workplaces, regardless of industry. However the nature of the lab can amplify these stressors.
“The whole health care system is overburdened and under funded so there is more pressure to do more with less,” says Dr. Posen. “The volume and velocity of work in labs are high and the need for accuracy is so great. The stakes are just higher and that leads to more stress.”
Good vs bad stress
“A certain amount of stress is inevitable and some is even good for us,” points out Dr. Posen. “Stress can motivate and energize us, but too much of it can lead to serious health issues.” The positive and negative effects of stress are illustrated in the The Human Function Curve, which Dr. Posen adapted from Peter Nixon, a British cardiologist (Figure 1):
According to the curve, increased stress initially produces increased performance. We need a certain amount of stress to function well (healthy tension or good stress). However, stress turns to distress (bad stress) when there is too much of it, when it lasts too long or when it occurs too often. Once you pass a certain point (the hump), any more stress results in decreased performance. Trying harder at this point is counterproductive and will eventually lead to health problems. “I would say that the stress in the workplace has long ago crossed over to the distress side.” says Dr. Posen.
Identifying signs of distress
According to Dr. Posen, fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of stress but is often overlooked or blamed on something else. Also, look for changes from your normal patterns like trouble sleeping, forgetfulness, loss of motivation or enthusiasm, feeling distracted, or decreased libido. These may be early warning signs of distress. Left unaddressed, these early warning signs can turn into physical manifestations such as headaches, dizziness, clenching the jaw or grinding the teeth, muscle pain in the neck, shoulders and back, chest pains, or abdominal issues such as indigestion, cramps, constipation or diarrhea.
Managing stress is a shared responsibility
The management of workplace stress needs to be a shared responsibility between the employer and employee. Dr. Posen emphasizes the need to have more accountability on the employer side of the equation. “Individuals need to take responsibility for their stress management, but the workplace must too. The problem over the last 10 to 20 years is that workplaces have abdicated their responsibility and dumped it all on individuals. That has to stop.” When looking at solutions to workplace stress, Dr. Posen gives advice for both the employer and individual employees.
David Posen is a family physician specializing in stress management and author of Is Work Killing You?: A Doctor’s Prescription for Treating Workplace Stress. He lectures widely across North America, speaking to Fortune 500 companies as well as professional, government, education and community groups.
Managing your own stress
So what can you do to help manage your own stress? Dr. Posen offers four simple strategies that you can start practicing today:
1. Decrease or discontinue caffeine
Most people do not realize that caffeine (like that found in coffee, tea, chocolate, cola beverages and energy drinks) actually generates a stress reaction in the body. It acts as a stimulant which makes us jittery, nervous, interrupts normal sleep patterns and can cause heartburn and muscle aches.
The best way to see if your caffeine intake is having a negative effect on you is to remove it from your diet. It can take about three weeks to notice the effect, but if you feel better after the three weeks this may be a strategy you want to stick with. Dr. Posen warns to wean yourself gradually to avoid migraine-type withdrawal headaches.
2. Exercise regularly
At its root, stress is the fight-or-flight response in the body. Adrenaline and other stress hormones cause physiologic changes such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, faster breathing, muscle tension and increased blood sugar. This built-in response provides us with the strength and energy to either fight or run away from danger.
While fighting and running away are rarely appropriate responses to workplace stress, our bodies still respond in this way. With no place for this excess energy to go, our bodies can stay in a state of arousal for several hours.
Exercise dissipates this excess energy. Regular exercise (at least four to five times per week for a minimum of 30 minutes each time) can provide an outlet for the stress in our daily lives. Dr. Posen suggests choosing an activity you enjoy or exercise will feel like a chore and you will begin to avoid it. Whether it is a brisk walk, run, bike ride or an organized sport, the activity you enjoy most will likely be the most sustainable strategy and therefore give you the greatest long-term benefit.
3. Get more sleep
Sleep is an important way of reducing stress. People dealing with unhealthy levels of stress often suffer from fatigue and, unfortunately, people who are tired do not cope well with stressful situations. These dynamics can create a vicious cycle. In addition, sleep deprivation itself can generate stress in the body.
Getting more sleep can make you feel better and improve your ability to cope with the stress you encounter during the day. Most people require about eight hours of sleep per night, although an individual’s requirement can vary from six to ten hours. A large percentage of the patients Dr. Posen sees suffer from chronic sleep deprivation.
Dr. Posen looks for three signs of healthy sleep behaviour: waking refreshed, good daytime energy and waking naturally before the alarm goes off in the morning. If you are not experiencing these three signs, you could probably use more sleep. This can be the single most important change you can make to help with your stress management and overall health.
4. Take time-outs
There are three types of time-outs that Dr. Posen feels we all need to make time for: breaks, leisure and vacation. If you were working in a physically demanding job, you would need to take breaks throughout the day to let your muscles rest. Similarly, your brain needs to take breaks from mentally or intellectually challenging roles, like those found in the laboratory.
“The brain is like a muscle,” explains Dr. Posen. “You need to rest it just like you would rest any other muscle after periods of exertion.” When referring to leisure, Dr. Posen speaks of taking time for yourself throughout the week. This can be any activity that you enjoy, whether it be time with friends, family or just time to yourself. “We have to give ourselves permission to take time for self-care. I call it enlightened self-interest.” says Dr. Posen. “Leisure is an important antidote to chronic stress.”
Just as you need breaks throughout the day and week, vacations provide a respite throughout the year which Dr. Posen says is needed to help manage stress. “Canadian’s left 34 million paid vacation days on the table in 2009,” says Dr. Posen. “People have accepted too much work and stress as being normal but it isn’t and it’s not healthy.”
The employer’s responsibility
“The problem now is in the system,” explains Dr. Posen. “The workplace has been ramping up the stress for years and telling employees that they have to deal with it. It is like blaming the victim.” There are a number of strategies that Dr. Posen recommends when he speaks with employers about addressing workplace stress. To summarize, he puts forward five key actions:
Dr. Posen’s latest book, Is Work Killing You?: A Doctor’s Prescription for Treating Workplace Stress, describes the biology of stress and offers practical advice and easy techniques for managing the harmful symptoms and side effects of stress. Dr. Posen’s book is available through major retailers and his website, www. davidposen.com.
1. Acknowledge the problem
Stress is a real issue in today’s work environment and acknowledging that the problem exists is a necessary first step towards change. The next step is to realistically look at the overall workplace environment. Dr. Posen suggests the system that has evolved in your workplace may be unsustainable and needs to be addressed. “You can’t keep pushing people to do more with less,” says Dr. Posen. “If everything is hurry, hurry, rush, rush then something is wrong and it needs to be looked at it from a systemic level.”
2. Help people to monitor stress levels
Employers need to watch how their staff function and intervene when they need help. Key areas to look at are the volume and velocity of their work and how they are coping with it. When it comes to the volume of work, Dr. Posen cautions that behaviours that have become norms, like multi-tasking, can be a big part of the problem. “Multitasking is something that should be discouraged in the workplace rather than extolled as some kind of virtue,” explains Dr. Posen. “Nobody is really good at multitasking; if anything, they are good at switch-tasking. Multitasking by definition is undoable, it’s a myth. Workload needs to be measured out so people don’t feel under the gun.”
3. Encourage time-outs/breaks
Workplace culture has shifted over the years and now breaks are seen as luxuries that sometimes only exist on paper. Employer attitudes are partly to blame for creating such a culture but Dr. Posen says that this can be easily addressed. “If you see people start to lose focus and concentration, which happens to all of us every two hours or so, encourage them to take a break and come back fresh,” offers Dr. Posen. “Trying to work through these periods just leads to less productivity.”
4. Be approachable
Let people know that if they are struggling, they can come and talk to you. Managers also need to ask questions to encourage employees to safely share how they are feeling about their work.
5. Identify problem people and deal with them
Managers need to be vigilant when confronted with the issue of abusive colleagues. This type of behaviour cannot be tolerated and while it may be easier to turn a blind eye in the short term, the situation will likely not correct itself. In fact, it typically gets worse. “I’m not talking about prickly personalities,” Dr. Posen clarifies, “but if people are frankly abusive and creating problems they need to be identified and put on notice.” Interventions can take many forms, such as referring those individuals for counselling themselves or sensitivity training. Whatever the intervention, the message must be clear that the behaviour must stop. Shaping the culture of the workplace is vital to enabling the success of employees.
“If people have a lot to do but work in a collegial atmosphere, they will have less stress than someone who doesn’t have an unduly heavy workload but is working in a toxic environment,” explains Dr. Posen. At the end of the day, Dr. Posen hopes employers and employees alike will begin to start looking at workplace stress in a new light. “This is not just a health problem, it’s a public health problem,” states Dr. Posen. “It’s ironic that we push people to the point that we get less out of them. This needs to stop for the benefit of both employers and employees.”