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April 11, 2006

Long working hours and stress

Familiar quotes:

"Working hard - working longer than the boss."

"If the boss is in the office, I also must stay on. It would look bad if I leave early."

"How come she is leaving early? Nothing to do, ha?"

" What, how come, that he is off work already?"

"Lucky I am not the only one that is staying back late!"

Habits are hard to break. Especially when habits are reenforced in a company by those "in power". They stay on, you stay on. It looks bad on you and for your bonus and your promotion if you leave early. No worries about stress, lacking family life, no work -life balance. Once you are up there you will change and pay back to those below you.

Sounds familiar?

How bad can worklife be? Be in the office at 10.00 PM, or later? Regularly? No wonder that you feel stressed. Stress in large quantities is a menace. It kills - as simple as that.

And, if you are still alive when you retire, how do you want to look back at your life? Are you then proud to say that you worked 15 or 16 hours a day throughout your life?

But in fact, change often starts with management. They set the habits. If they leave early or late, they set the pace. If they are educating the clients that life is life, and that there is a life after office hours, then so be it. Ask yourself - how effective are you after 9, 9, 10 hours of working? Or have you learnt to cope by including little breaks here and there? These are then coping mechanism - survival is driving you.

Not a good life, right?

Modern office life causes a lot of stress.

Stress is an interesting topic - it is exciting because there are stressed people all around us. Stress management will be something for years to come. NLP has some great tools to work with stress and it works well with hypnosis and timeline therapy.

The main part is to see how you, as an individual, interpret the stress. Stress is happening inside of you. What is stressful for one person is relaxing for another, so to speak. Just think of those in the LRT or stuck in a traffic jam. Some take it as an opportunity to watch, observe or even meet other people, while others look around, wild-eyed, and on the edge of anxiety.

Fact is that everybody can learn how to react to stress. Our body reacts to external events and switches on the fight-or - flight reactions. Shall we stay or shall we run. Important of course, if you are living with sabre-tooth tigers, but how to run in an office environment where the only sabre-tooth tiger is your boss? You have to live it out, the environment won't change, the bossy sabre-tooth tiger won't go away that quickly.

So learning how to live with stress is important to all of us in an ever changing, ever faster environment.










Posted by Andreas at April 11, 2006 12:24 PM

Comments

I agree with Chasyss, I don't mind working long hours either. But dealing with difficult, commanding people is quite stressful, even more stressful than working long hours. It may depend on what you're doing. If it's something you enjoy then you may be able to work long hours and overtime on weekends because you enjoy doing it anyway. It may become a way of life rather than work. But if there are difficult people to handle, one may prefer to get the job over and done with quickly so as to find something else more enjoyable to do.

Posted by: James at April 14, 2006 12:49 AM

After working til late for so long, I think some people won't feel stressed even after working past 9pm. Probably have adapted and accepted it as a way of life. Personally I don't find long working hours as stressful as other things, like having to deal with difficult people.

Posted by: chasyss at April 11, 2006 10:44 PM

i think if we are working late, means that we must learn how to love our jobs. And we should have some target or goal as mayb after working hard/late until we reach age 30-35, we able to started enjoy real life.. ^_^

Posted by: dragoncity at April 11, 2006 07:39 PM

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