NATURE OF STRESS

NATURE OF STRESS

Job stress and its related condition, job burden contribute to poor physical and mental health. Employees stress is a source of discomfort and a major concern to managers and stakeholders.

In order to effectively prevent and control stress, you first need to understand the nature and causes of these conditions. A good starting point in understanding stress symptoms is to take the self – quiz presented over the issue as used here, stress is the mental and physical condition that results from a perceived threat that cannot be dealt with readily. Stress is therefore an internal response to a state of activation. The stressed person is physically and mentally aroused. Stress ordinarily occurs in a threatening or negative situation, such as receiving a major promotion.

A person experiencing stress display certain symptoms indicating that he or she is trying to cope with a systems can include a host of physiological, emotional, and behavioural reaction.

Physiological symptoms of stress include increased heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, pupil size and perspiration. If these physiological symptoms are servere or persist over a prolonged period, the result can be a stress-related disorder, such as a heart attack, hypertension, migraine, headache, ulcer, colitis, or allergy. Stress also lead to a chemical imbalance that adversely affects the body immune system. People experiencing emotional stress may experience difficulty shaving a common cold or recovering from sexually transmitted diseases.

Emotional symptoms of stress include anxiety, tension, depression, discouragement, boredom, prolonged fatigue, feeling of hopelessness, and various kind of defensive thinking. Note that anxiety is a general sense of dread, fear, or worry for no immediate reason, and is a symptom of stress. Behavioural symptom include nervous habits, such as facial twitching and sudden decrease in job performance due to forgetfulness and errors in concentration or judgment, increased use of alcohol and other drugs may also occur. Procrastination is another potential symptom of negative stress.

Stress has both negative and positive consequences, hindrance stressors are those stressful events and thoughts that have a negative effect on motivation and performance. In contrast, challenge stressors have a positive direct effect on motivation and performance.

People require the right amount of stress to keep them mentally and physically alert. Managers create challenge stressors by challenging workers and being passionate about work. if the stress is particularly uncomfortable or distasteful, however, it will lower job performance, particularly on complex demanding jobs. An examples of a stressor that will lower job performance for most people is a bullying, abrasive manager who wants to see the employee fail.

A person perception of something (or something) usually determines whether it acts as a challenge or hindrance stressor. For examples, a person might perceive an inspection by top-level managers to be frightening that he is valuable towards team members. Another manager might wlcome the visit as a chance to proudly display her department high-quality performance. An extensive review of research about job stress concludes that stress is less likely to lower performance when employees have high level of self-esteem and commitment to the organization.

After prolonged exposure to job stress, a person turns the risk of feeling. Job burnout is a pattern of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion n response to chronic job stressors, cynicism, apathy and indifference are the major behavioural symptoms of the burned-out workers.