How to use the Golden Rule to help address your stress at work

How we react to stress

Evolution shows us that our stress response was designed to ensure the continuation of our species. If a zebra is attacked by a lion it knows it must run faster than the lion, or get eaten. To be able to run that fast, the zebra needs all its body’s resources focused on getting energy to its heart and legs—other systems, such as digestion and reproduction, are just shut down because they are not needed for immediate survival. Human bodies react in the very same way—the big difference is that when the danger passes for the zebra, it quickly settles and returns to quietly grazing. The trouble with us is that we turn on the exact same stress response for purely psychological reasons—a challenging boss, a tight deadline, an important presentation. All these will trigger the release of adrenalin and other stress hormones, which over time can have a devastating effect on our health. Unlike the zebra, we don’t seem to be able to find our off-button for stress and so the disturbance to our system just keeps running until we find ourselves living in a state of constant simmering of worry and anxiety.

What this means in the workplace

Not surprisingly, much of this worry and anxiety is centred around work. In the last decade stress at work has become a major concern. Currently, one in three people working in the EU experience stress in their workplace and around 50% of all lost working days are due to stress.

The Whitehall studies of British civil servants in 1967 and 1985-88 set out to investigate the complex relationships between income, work status, psychosocial support, health behaviors, and resulting morbidity and mortality. The studies were detailed and produced a great deal of important data but their findings were that men and women in the higher ranks of the Civil Service experienced less stress then people in the lower ranks. The less job control people had, the higher their risk of coronary heart disease. If people were promoted and felt they had more control their risk for heart disease declined.

If you think about your own job you can probably add a few more factors that lead to stress at work—such as job insecurity, low wages, and heavy workloads. However, this issue of having little control, or a feeling of powerlessness is one that often comes up when I talk with people about their work situations. Inevitably there is often little that can be done from a workplace perspective but there is a lot we can do in how we manage our own attitudes at work.

Taking control of our attitude at work

It’s all too easy to get into habits at work, often as a way of surviving the stress that we experience. When I was working as a teacher in a tough inner city school in London, I was really struck by the ‘us and them’ attitude that most of the other teachers adopted as a way of managing the considerable stress of the job. The ‘us’ was always the teachings staff. The ‘them’ changed according to the crisis of the day—it could be the pupils, or the parents, or the head-teacher and frequently the government! After a while it became quite toxic, especially as you aroused suspicion if you did not subscribe to the staff room view.

Here are three questions you could try asking yourself:

• How would you describe your attitude at work?
• How to you react to your fellow workers?
• Which inner resources do you feel you draw on to manage your work?

Taking time out to reflect on each of these questions in an open, searching manner will give you plenty of clues as to how you can overcome feelings of powerlessness at work by managing your attitudes. Look for the places where you might have got stuck, and are perhaps making assumptions about things where the circumstances have changed. Consider whether you are taking proper care of yourself in terms of your work-life balance and how much work weighs on your mind when you are not there. Try looking for some new approaches—however unlikely they may seem at first glance, give them a try.

Try this suggestion—use the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is: Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.

Applying the Golden Rule at work is a good foundation for positive communication and conflict resolution. Few of us would want to be gossiped about, ignored, not consulted, or made fun of and get we may find ourselves tending to do that towards a work colleague. If we ever find ourselves indulging in a piece of gossip about our boss, or an associate; if we keep our distance from someone because we get the feeling we won’t like them, or if tend to over-look a team member’s input because it challenges our own, then right there we are not applying the Golden Rule. We may dress gossip up as a bit of harmless fun, or justify not liking someone, or call it being skilful to avoid confrontation with opposing views but in fact we need to ask ourselves how we would feel if we over-heard some gossip about our own life, or were told someone did not like to be around us, or were consistently passed over in team discussions. It pretty much certain that it would not make us feel more motivated to get to work each day.

The Golden Rule is not a magic wand. It will not make any difficulties we have with people at work go away in one clean sweep. What it will do is to help bring the other people closer, to put them on the same level as ourselves. We just need to keep asking ourselves the question: how would I feel if this was happening to me? The answer we get back will give us an accurate and reliable indication of whether we are behaving in the most appropriate way. It will also help us to keep reflecting on our attitudes at work because it can be seen as an answer to all three of the questions above. It involves us reviewing our attitude at work, especially towards our colleagues and we will need to draw on our inner resources of empathy and kindness to stick with it. Most importantly, it will help us to manage our stress differently by enabling us to feel that we are taking some control over the environment we work in.