The other day I was talking to a colleague about a student who I described as “so laid back they are almost horizontal”. This young man has been achieving good grades, but is so chilled it makes it seem as though he does no work, yet manages to get everything done. It’s particularly annoying to the rest of us, apparently running ever faster on our own little hamster wheels to try and complete all of our work.
My student is in the minority. Most people I know are working hard but also saying they are finding it tough to get all their tasks completed. They feel as though they are on a never-ending journey. It is so commonplace, that the charity Mental Health UK, disclosed last year that 91% of people at work experience high pressure and stress. According to the charity’s study, more than four in ten workers said a high or increasing workload was contributing to their stress.
So while thinking of stressful events, can you imagine then how it must have felt to people travelling back to London Heathrow Airport yesterday to discover it was closed to aircraft following a fire near a runway. Some flights were diverted to Manchester, only for the poor folk disembarking to discover there was travel chaos there due to a power cut on the rail network. Everyone’s stress levels would have been sky high, which is where the passengers would have rather been instead of amongst the ground level chaos.
Wherever you look, there are triggers for increased stress and anxiety. Last week Huff Post was one of many media outlets reporting a rise in “heat anxiety” following the unusually long period of warm weather. Plus, Ipsos reported last month that the nation is suffering from more “crime anxiety” than before. This is despite the fact that, according to official statistics, many forms of crime have actually been falling over the past decade. Whether it is the heat, crime or travel, we are increasingly getting stressed out.
Combine that with pressure at work and it is easy to see how so many people are ending up with burnout. Worse still, according to a British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) report in June, almost one in five UK adults say they are experiencing work-related burnout. Yet BACP therapists say burnout is often ‘the last thing people will admit to’. We seem to be anxious and stressed and try to battle on regardless. Stiff upper lip and all that.
The world around us is increasingly stressful at the same time as work pressures are also mounting for many people. It feels like you are working harder than ever, but the job just doesn’t get done. Against this background, however, are two new pieces of research that could provide a way forward – unless you are like my chilled-out student and don’t need any help.
The first study from Athens, reported in Nature a couple of months ago, showed that our resilience depends upon five factors. These include whether we can imagine a worthwhile future, experience a sense of success and, importantly, have sufficient spacing between demands to allow recovery. It ties into the second piece of research published last week by Australian psychologists.
This particular research found that workers who take several small breaks each day feel more energised and less stressed than people who keep on working. The study showed that repeatedly stopping work and doing something else allows time for something of a reset. This matches the Athens study, which also found that breaks provide respite.
Simple things like taking a walk around the building or chatting to colleagues about what you watched on TV last night are enough to provide the rest break needed for stress levels to fall.
We live in a stressful world, with mounting work pressures. By keeping on working to “get the job done”, we are making things worse for ourselves and steering towards burnout. Instead, it appears that the best way to get the job done is to stop doing the job several times a day. So, if you want to get more done, perhaps the most productive thing you can put in your diary is an appointment to stop working.
