Beat workplace stress
In The Stress Code, educator and consultant Richard Sutton offers practical tools to buffer the adverse effects of stress. In this extract, he shows how a change in work culture can reduce stress and its negative effects on employees’ health and productivity
TWO ACCLAIMED STUDIES PERFORMED BY SIR MICHAEL MARMOT , a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, have provided extraordinary insights into stress and health outcomes.
The Whitehall studies monitored approximately 28 000 British civil servants over a 40-year period. The studies confirmed for the first time that stress in the workplace directly affects health and lifespan – again, something we intuitively know. More importantly, the Whitehall studies identified that the grade of employment was one of the most reliable predictors of perceived stress and increased risk of mortality from a wide range of diseases.
Logically, we would assume that senior, high-ranking employees would be more prone to health issues, due partly to increased responsibilities and partly to seniority in age. However, the study showed the exact opposite. It was the lower-ranking employees within the organisation who had the worst health and highest risk of premature death. In fact, those in the lowest-ranking positions had a 300 per cent higher risk of mortality when compared to the most senior employees over the ten-year period of the study.
Several years later, the second of the Whitehall studies (Whitehall II) confirmed these findings. However, this second study was able to identify why this was the case – it cracked the stress code. The researchers showed that the lower-ranking employees had less social support, less variety at work and, most importantly, an overwhelming sense of lack of control when compared with those in more senior positions.
What the study identified was that the highest perceived levels of stress, and consequently the greatest degree of health compromise, were in environments where control is lacking. Supporting this assertion, in a 2015 meta-analysis, Harvard Professor Jim Goh and Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer describe a lack of job control to be the leading cause of premature mortality (>40 per cent greater risk) within the broader framework of stress. So much so that it overshadows the stress-health implications of unemployment (40 per cent increased risk) and work or family conflict (20 per cent increased risk).
TRIGGERS IN STRESS
Recent research has turned conventional wisdom within the context of stress and health outcomes on its head. The notion that a high degree of life pressure and responsibility promotes stress and is associated with poor health outcomes has been notably proven incorrect. This is just as well, seeing that responsibilities and pressures in life appear to be on the rise, and there are no indications that this will change any time soon. According to a 2014 report by the American Psychological Association and the American Institute of Stress, 48 per cent of people living in the US say their stress has increased in the last five years. There is no reason to believe that this data doesn’t apply to other industrialised nations as well.
While chronically high demands can be independently associated with compromised health, it is the combination of high demands and a lack of control that appears to be one of the greatest drivers in stress and its wide range of negative health associations.
If we reflect on our experiences of stress throughout the course of our lives, a sense of lack of control has accompanied almost every challenging situation. However, the Whitehall and several more recent studies have identified many other major factors in the promotion of this biologically exhausting state, whether in a professional environment or in our personal lives.
Some of the more profound factors in the workplace include:
→ a lack of fairness, or injustice
→ a lack of, or poor, social support
→ social isolation
→ an effort-reward imbalance
→ a lack of authority over dayto-day decisions
Either independently or in combination, each factor contributes to over-activation of the stress axis and progressively erodes our core health.
Although the Whitehall and many of the offshoot studies focus on the corporate environment, Sir Michael Marmot believes that they provide far more than merely an insight into professional behaviours and health outcomes. Rather, they serve as a template for society at large.
The impact we have on those around us is far greater than we realise, and if we wish to reduce societal stress and negative health associations, we need to start with ourselves. Improving our behaviour and treatment of others can dramatically impact their well-being in both the short and long term.
Marmot believes that 40 years of research, involving tens of thousands of people, has shown that societal stress and its negative health associations can be significantly reduced by:
→ allowing people to feel that they have more control in their lives
→ encouraging and supporting skills development and education
→ always rewarding positive
behaviours
→ allowing others to be involved and participate in communal decisions
→ always promoting fairness and a sense of justice in both the workplace and at home
→ always championing and encouraging fair treatment of others
Ever spend an entire day ‘working’ only to find you didn’t actually get any work done? This might help explain why
WE DON’T NEED AN EXPERT TO TELL US THAT, INCREASINGLY, THE WORLD IS A DISTRACTING PLACE.
Luckily, Chris Bailey’s new book Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction doesn’t stop there. Instead, it’s a book about productivity that, rather ironically, takes aim at the cult of productivity: we’re so worried about being busy these days that we rarely take the time to di erentiate ‘being busy’ from ‘actually working’. So we called up Bailey to ask how we could reclaim our attention not just to get more done, but to get more done of what we actually need to be doing.
GQ: Can you unpack the role that intention plays when it comes to attention?
Chris Bailey: We tend to look at how busy we are as a proxy for our productivity... People think productivity’s about doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster.
But it’s really about doing the right things and doing those things deliberately and with intention. Not all things on our plate are created equal. ere are some tasks through which we accomplish 10 times as much as doing anything else. For example, email is an essential part of my work. But writing an article that hundreds of thousands or millions of people read is a lot more consequential than ltering email that a ects only one person (me).
Our attention is drawn like a magnet to anything that’s pleasurable, that we nd threatening, and that we nd novel. And so there’s even a novelty bias embedded within the prefrontal cortex: we get rewarded with a hit of dopamine for each new thing we focus on. Our mind rewards us for falling into this cycle of distraction, and for paying attention to the unimportant things on our plate.
e most vital things in our work are rarely the most pleasurable, threatening, or novel. And that’s the problem with our attention. Deadlines have a way of making our work a lot more threatening, which makes us focus on it. But when our work is more free-form that’s when we start to gravitate to the things that are attractive in the moment that don’t lead us to accomplish as much.
GQ: Tim Urban has an incredible post about procrastination. He talks about how the rational part of our brain is always fighting with the instant gratification part, and the instant gratification part always wins.
CB: One of my favourite studies on procrastination was conducted by Tim Pitchell out of the Carleton University. He found that there are certain triggers that a task can have that make us more likely to put it o . ose are when a task is boring, frustrating, di cult, lacks personal meaning, lacks intrinsic reward, is ambiguous, and unstructured.
Writing is a great example of this: it’s so rewarding, but it’s so o en ambiguous, unstructured, tedious, and di cult. So we procrastinate. We pay attention to something that’s pleasurable, threatening or novel instead. Once you start to deconstruct your attention, you realise, it’s not this ambiguous idea: there are things that trigger us to focus [and] there are things that trigger us to resist paying attention to something.
GQ: Another problem: the walls guarding out attention are more porous than ever, right? Email is especially pernicious.
CB: e fascinating thing about email is: it takes up little of our time but it takes up a disproportionate amount of our attention. And so the average worker checks their email 88 times over the course of the day. ere’s a cost to this constant switching that I think people don’t really realise. And it’s the reason multi-tasking doesn’t work: we can’t seamlessly switch from doing one thing to doing another thing. Our mind isn’t capable of that.
ere’s a certain attentional residue le over from what we were just focusing on before.
Maybe right before we were doing this interview, we had a really harsh meeting with our boss. We won’t be able to then direct our attention completely to this conversation, because there will be that residue. But we experience this on a moment-by-moment basis, too. When we switch to email, this has been shown to make our work take about 50% longer.
When we say we don’t have time for something, we’re really just saying that something’s not important to us... You have time for everything. It’s just that you choose to do other things.
Ask yourself: are you just checking email because it’s stimulating, or because you’re actually going to act upon what you’ve received? Check for new messages only if you have the time, the attention, and the energy to deal with whatever comes in. One of my favourite tactics is an email sprint. At the top of the hour, set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, and blow through as many emails as you possibly can. You still have 45(ish) minutes outside of that time to focus on what’s more meaningful and what’s more productive.