Emotions Can Run High in the Workplace… Here’s How to Manage Yours

The average person will spend an estimated one-third of their life at work. One third. That’s a lot of time, providing plenty of opportunity to accumulate stress. Over time, these emotions could potentially overwhelm your employees and lead to a breakdown. This is, naturally, harmful to your business, so let’s explore some strategies you can share with your team to help them deal with their workday stresses.

Separate Yourself from Your Stress

The feeling of rising stress is unmistakable, particularly when you’ve experienced it before. Sometimes, escaping this stress is a matter of actually moving yourself away from it. Take a break, walk away, and do some deep breathing. Removing yourself from the situation can make all the difference, allowing you to rally and recover.

On the emotional side of things, practice looking at things from an outside perspective. While the situation will still be stressful, doing your best to take yourself out of it and considering it as though it is happening to someone else can help to take off the pressure until you can collect yourself. It can also give you the insight needed to see the stress-inducing issues from a new perspective, allowing you to solve them more effectively. 

Identify What Triggers Your Stress

If you want to avoid emotional breakdowns at work, it’s important that you are able to figure out what sets you off so that you can adjust to avoid or minimize them. For instance, maybe you have a rough time handling criticism, or you get a little bit of stage fright while making a presentation. Once you’ve identified these triggers, you can start to create techniques to help you manage your response…maybe a quick conversation with a trusted coworker before you have to speak, or (as we alluded to above) taking a walk to process the criticism you’ve received. 

Work Through Emotions

Speaking of processing criticism, it’s important that any and all negative feelings are appropriately dealt with so that they don’t interfere with workplace processes or relationships. Simply trying to push these feelings down and lock them away is exhausting and, frankly, unsustainable. This is why it is so important to take the time to process these emotions before they lead to the dreaded meltdown.

Have a Recovery Strategy

However, in the event that your emotions do get the better of you in the office, you need to be able to recover. Fortunately, there’s precedent that says that associating these kinds of emotions with your commitment to your job helps others in the office to see them less negatively—research conducted by Harvard Business School says as much. Explain that the stress is borne of a desire to see personal and organizational success, and try to manage your emotions better the next time.

The Right Technology Can Help Cut Down on Workplace Stress

While we would never suggest that all stress will be eliminated with a few IT improvements, it can certainly help simplify a lot of things in the workplace. Reach out to us for assistance in managing your IT so that’s one less source of stress for you and your team. Call 301-571-5040 today.