Tag: stress

Campus Resources to Reduce Stress

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April is Stress Awareness Month! Everyday stress can take an immense toll on our mental health. While all of us experience stress, we all manage our stress differently. It’s essential to find ways to manage stress if we want to maintain our health and wellbeing. To help you make stress reduction a priority this month, MSU Human Resources has compiled this list of MSU campus resources: 

Activities 

  • Wellbeing Wednesdays: The WorkLife Office and Health4U are partnering to bring you Wellbeing Wednesdays. These weekly sessions are focused on wellbeing in its many forms: workplace wellbeing, mental health wellbeing, physical wellbeing, and more.  
  • Join them on April 12 for Art Therapy! Destressing sometimes means unleashing your inner child. This Wellbeing Wednesday will guide you in making some artwork. 
  • Campus Meditation Map: Beal Scholar, Anhad Viswananth, created this incredible meditation map to highlight the best spots to meditate around campus. 
  • MSU Campus Walking Tour: Taking time to be outdoors and exercise is a great way to manage stress. Health4U has provided a campus walking tour with maps of multiple walking paths throughout campus.  
  • Get Active this Spring: Warmer weather on the horizon means more opportunities to get outside! From sailing and stand-up paddleboarding to golf leagues and group fitness classes, there are tons of opportunities on campus and in the greater Lansing community to make exercise part of your weekly routine. Check out these opportunities and consider joining with a friend. 
  • Sleep: Understanding and Optimizing Your Nightly Reboot: Quality sleep is vital for our health, but it isn’t always easy to come by. This class will explore the science of sleep, the impact sleep has on overall health and wellbeing, and how to improve your sleep quality. Join this virtual webinar on April 18 to learn more.  
  • Rest with Music: The MSU School of Music, Abrams Planetarium, and Health4U invite you to take an hour out of your month to listen and simply REST WITH MUSIC. Join in-person at the planetarium or participate via Facebook live. 

Learning Resources 

  • Managing Stress and Work: This recorded Wellbeing Wednesday webinar shares tools and strategies for identifying stressors, prioritizing responsibilities, and managing stress throughout your career. 
  • Mess Makes Stress: This article will help you find ways to declutter your space, making for a less stressful environment.  
  • How to Recognize and Minimize Burnout During Uncertain Times: This recorded webinar will help you identify how burnout is affecting your work and personal life.  
  • Stress Reduction: Health4U provides different articles and resources that specifically target dealing with stress. 
  • Toolkit: Managing Stress: This resource on the Toward a Respectful Workplace website helps identify the stressors in your life and how to manage them. 
  • How to Avoid or Manage Burnout: This article will help you learn how to avoid burnout and what to do if you’re experiencing it.
     

Have another resource you’d like to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

Unplugged: How to Disconnect from Work and Enjoy Your Vacation

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As travel restrictions ease and the summer heats up, there is no better time to take a vacation or staycation. Taking time away from work has many health benefits including improving your connection to yourself and loved ones and resetting from or avoiding burnout.

The Benefits of Taking a Vacation

Vacationing and taking time away from your job promotes a long, healthy life and has tremendous benefits to your mind. Taking a break from routine in fun and different ways can have the same benefits as consistent meditation exercises and help you build connections with not only your loved ones but yourself, too. In addition, taking a vacation has been scientifically proven to boost brain power. Taking time off from learning, working and gaining new information every day allows your brain to consolidate existing knowledge, resulting in improved learning after vacation.

The benefits go beyond just your mind — they affect your body too. Through reduced stress, vacations can improve heart health and decrease chances of metabolic diseases or conditions. Vacation time also improves sleep as poor sleep habits can be broken when sleeping in a new place. Coming home after vacation feels like sleeping in another new place, allowing those improved habits to continue.

Using vacation time is one of the best ways to reset from or avoid burnout. Check out this video from Jamie Hutchinson, the Deputy Director of the MSU Worklife Office, where she explains the five phases of burnout and how to avoid or correct them. Taking a vacation and then coming back to work helps reset a person to their “honeymoon phase,” a term used in Hutchinson’s video. 

Before Going on Vacation

To take full advantage of these benefits, you should consider fully unplugging from work — those emails and phone calls won’t go anywhere. 

Before you head to the airport or hit the road, set up automatic email replies with your out-of-office details including when you will be back, who to contact in the meantime, and how to contact you in case of an emergency if needed. If you use a shared calendar with your team, add your out-of-office dates as early as possible and notify your team verbally and/or by email. If you have ongoing projects, consider asking a coworker, supervisor, or team member to check up on them while you are away and plan to share updates when you return. If possible, leave work-related things at home or at the office to prevent the temptation to focus on work. Finally, prepare for the day you return from work before you leave by keeping your schedule as clear as you reasonably can on your first day back.

Returning from Vacation

Returning to work can often be stressful and sometimes undo the rest you achieved on vacation. To avoid getting immediately burned out, take time to ease back into your work routine. Try to avoid scheduling several meetings on your first day back and try not to set or meet big deadlines during your first week back in the office. The more time you spend away, the more time you should give yourself to get back to your normal work pace and routine.

In addition to easing into your normal work routine, it’s important to unplug from work at the end of each day. It’s easy to get burned out if you are mentally on the clock 24/7, answering emails and catching up during nights and weekends. You can use Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Google Calendar and other work team services to set out-of-office messages at the end of your workday. Finally, avoid stress by taking the necessary steps to be productive and engaged as shared in this earlier post about avoiding and reducing burnout. 

All these tips and more are available through these links:

Are You Procrastinating? Increase Motivation and Take Action with These Simple Steps.

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There are countless reasons to put off working on a project. Maybe you’re daunted by the size of it, or the deadline is far off, so you don’t feel urgency to get moving. Whether your procrastination is the result of perfectionism, negative thought patterns, or even boredom, there are easy changes you can make to increase your motivation and complete high-quality work without missing deadlines.

Take charge of your day

It’s easy to find excuses to not take action. I don’t have time. I’m too busy. I’ll do it later when things calm down. To move beyond procrastination, you need to take charge of your time.

  • Don’t let external demands control your time. Deadlines and mundane tasks are likely a part of your days. Take charge of your schedule.
  • Minimize interruptions. Turn off your Teams, Outlook, and text notifications if you can. Block off time on your calendar. Prioritize your tasks.
  • Ask yourself: What needs to be done now? What can wait until later?
  • Figure out and respect your preferred working methods and energy levels. Consider when you’re most productive and schedule your day accordingly.

Set small deadlines

If you sometimes feel like you’re accomplishing nothing, it may be because your idea of getting something done is too big.

  • Focus on the wins, no matter how small. Set small goals and interim deadlines throughout the day.
  • As you hit each small target, you’ll build momentum and feel motivated to strive toward the next goal.

Achieve an optimal level of positive stress

We all face stress at work — deadlines to meet, unexpected problems to solve. It may sound counterintuitive, but a little stress can be a good thing. Positive stress can give you the energy you need to stay motivated. The key is to achieve an optimal level of healthy stress.

  • Know your limits. Find a challenge you can realistically take on.
  • Don’t be complacent. Push yourself to achieve great things, one step at a time. Remember that a challenge should stretch you without breaking you.

Collaborate to stay engaged

When we pool our resources and expertise to work on a task with others, we share ideas, discuss options, and develop ideas as a team. One person’s enthusiasm might inspire you. New eyes bring new perspectives, which may help you look at a task in a new way.

  • To ensure your collaboration is effective, be sure you have a diverse group to offer different perspectives.
  • Allow some quiet space to build on the ideas that emerge.
  • Effective collaboration can be structured or informal.

Try these techniques to help you take action and leave procrastination behind, and look into self-paced, online elevateU resources for further motivation and guidance.

graphic of a woman who looks stressed.

Leadership Blog Series: Recognizing and Managing Stress During Times of Change

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Written by Sharri Margraves, HR Associate Director for Organization and Professional Development

Based on some of my behavior choices over the past year (e.g., purchasing 50 lbs. of flour — why?), some might say I did not handle the stress of the pandemic very well. I’d have to agree. Personally, it was terrifying last spring when the threat of economic collapse seemed imminent. Those fears lessened but were then replaced by worries of illness, death, and the safety of my loved ones as the pandemic doubled down in Michigan and throughout the world.

Many of us are now preparing for a new kind of stress that reflects more unknowns, such as potential changes in work location, expectations, tasks, and what that all means to us as employees and colleagues. We are collectively experiencing unprecedented change across the organization by virtue of budget impacts and changes in senior leaders — both of which have a way of cascading through an organization and challenging the status quo.

Check Your Stress Level

One thing the pandemic did not do was ease the “normal” stressors in life such as divorce, familial issues, debt, and job change, to name a few. Consider taking the Life Change Stress Test, a self-assessment scale developed as a predictor of an individual’s well-being and the likelihood of illness. Where are you currently on the life-change stress index?

We may not share a common experience to change. What one person feels is a great idea might feel like an unnecessary and stressful change to another. You might find exhilaration in tackling new systems while others might find the same experience overwhelming. How leaders navigate these next few crucial months is expected to impact employee stress and, therefore, employee motivation and satisfaction — essential aspects of building a healthy and positive culture for our students and colleagues.

Are You Languishing?

The fact is there are many unknowns still surrounding the pandemic that, when combined with our everyday stress to navigate, can lead to even fun activities like weddings and graduations causing an increase in stress and a decrease in motivation.

In the work context, the continuous change we have been experiencing along with ongoing uncertainty can lead to what Adam Grant of The New York Times recently described as languishing. People may not be considered depressed, but they’re not flourishing either. After months of being on high alert, our bodies and brains are likely tired, stressed, and burned out by this state of hypervigilance.

Reduce the Impact of Stress

Keep in mind that stress does not need to be negative to have an impact on you, and not all stress needs to be immense to add up. Often, it is the compounding of little things that have a large impact. Recognizing your typical and atypical stressors — be they “positive” or “negative” — and how they impact you personally and professionally can better prepare you to successfully manage your stress and move out of a state of languishing. Engaging in reframing your situation, learning new coping strategies, exercising, or seeking services through Health4U Stress Reduction, your healthcare provider or EAP are all places to begin.

Take some simple steps to help yourself and your team get through this period of continuing uncertainty with improved stress management strategies and increased motivation. Here are a few additional, self-paced resources you might find helpful:

elevateU Online Resources

Additional Resources

Grant, A., May 5, 2021. There’s a name for the blah you are feeling: It’s called languishing. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html

Holmes, T.H., and Rahe, T.H. “The Social Readjustment Rating Scale,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 11:213, 1967. https://www.dartmouth.edu/eap/library/lifechangestresstest.pdf

photo of a man thinking

Challenge Your Ways of Thinking to Transform Negative Stress

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Written by Andrea Williams, Organization and Professional Development.

Stress affects each of us in different ways. For some, it provides the motivation to finish a difficult task, but for others, stress has an extremely negative impact. Part of why this occurs is because our reaction to stressors is based largely on our own perception of the stressors rather than the stressors themselves. Since our perception helps determine our level of stress, we can change our reactions and help lower our negative stress levels by adjusting our thinking.

One approach is to utilize the ABC model to help reframe how we experience and manage stress.

  • A: Activating Event — the actual event that causes a stressful reaction
  • B: Belief — how the event is perceived based on your thoughts and feelings
  • C: Consequence — the feelings you have or the actions you take in response to the stressful event that are related to your beliefs about the situation

Put the ABC Model to Work

When you experience a stressful event — anything from a tight work deadline to an argument with a colleague to a major life change — keep the ABC model in mind as you go through the following three-step process to manage your reaction:

  1. Identify your beliefs. Ask yourself, “Why did this situation happen?” Keep in mind that if your beliefs aren’t accurate, you may be overly negative or irrational in your thinking, leading to an even more stressful response.
  2. Challenge the negative thoughts causing your reaction. For example, consider:
    1. Are my thoughts based on fact or opinion?
    1. Am I sure the event happened for the reason I think it did?
    1. Can I view the event in any other way?
  3. Replace your negative or irrational thoughts with positive, rational ones. Determine the aspects of your thought process that led you to react negatively — perhaps you tend to overgeneralize, take things personally or place blame. Checking your beliefs in response to a stressful event can lead to a more resilient reaction to the stressful situation you face, lowering the overall level of stress you experience.

Challenge Your Irrational and Negative Thoughts

Inaccurate perceptions of events, particularly irrational and negative thoughts, can lead to elevated stress and make situations worse than they already are. Common irrational or negative ways of thinking include:

  • Thinking in absolute terms
  • Assuming you know what others think or know
  • Assuming you know how a situation will turn out
  • Assuming similar situations will always turn out the same
  • Making excuses

When you find yourself experiencing negative stress over an event or situation, change your perception of the event by challenging your thinking. Try asking yourself the following questions:

  • Is my understanding logical?
  • Is there any evidence to support my understanding?
  • Am I overreacting?
  • Are my expectations realistic?
  • Am I taking things too personally?
  • Am I wrongly blaming myself or others?

Although we can’t always avoid life’s stressors, we can manage our negative stress when we understand how it affects us. Taking deliberate steps to examine and transform negative stress can help improve everything from your job performance to your physical and mental well-being. For additional stress management assistance, take advantage of the many resources available to MSU faculty and staff, including the Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Health4U, and the MSU WorkLife Office.

Source:

Skillsoft Ireland Limited. Take a Deep Breath and Manage Your Stress. Retrieved April 22, 2021 from https://elevateu.skillport.com/skillportfe/main.action?path=summary/COURSES/pd_30_a03_bs_enus