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Safety Saturday: Stress Awareness
Can stress be a safety hazard? Yes! Stress is a common workplace concern that can lead to health and safety risks. While occasional stress poses little harm, prolonged stress affects the entire body and can negatively impact your well-being. Too much stress can take a toll and lead to accidents and injuries. This Safety Saturday will bring attention to the impact of stress and offer tips on managing stress.
Symptoms
There are many contributors to stress, whether it be in the workplace or not. Common causes of workplace stress include large workloads, high performance demands, or unstable work environments. The work-life balance is another major contributor to stress. Many people have difficulty separating work from home, particularly those who work from home.
Stress can manifest as physical health problems such as migraines, grinding teeth during sleep, eye-twitching, stomach aches, and heart problems. Stress can also increase the risk of job burnout, anxiety, depression, insomnia, hypertension, and frequent illnesses.
Stress Management
After polling the staff at Vogt Engineering, here are some of the ways our team manage stress: meditating, taking a walk and breathing in the fresh air, maintaining an optimal environment using temperature and lighting controls, listening to calming music, and squeezing a stress ball.
Additionally, the National Safety Council offers these tips to manage stress:
• Eat a balanced and nutritious diet starting with breakfast and get a good night’s sleep.
• Volunteer time and services; doing something for others can help a person forget their own problems and increase self-esteem.
• Keep moving! Studies show that exercising for 30 minutes a day reduces stress.
• Learn to express your feelings via hobbies such as journaling, gardening, and art.
• Determine the source of the stress; remove the stressor or try new coping strategies. If the stress can’t be removed from your life, learn to cope by developing a systematic and rational way of thinking through the situation.
• Seek professional help.
Stress in our lives is inevitable - we can only control how we manage that stress. Stress can impact your outlook on life, your relationships, and your performance in the workplace. Know it is never too late to form healthy habits. Making slight adjustments to manage your stress is crucial to staying safe while working and taking care of your physical and mental health.
