How to handle stress at work

Stress at work
 

We all need some pressure in our lives - it makes our work satisfying and helps us meet deadlines. But it's all about striking the right balance. Too much pressure without having the chance to recover causes stress, which can be damaging to our health.

Workplace stress is different for everyone - what is stressful for one person may not be stressful for another. It can depend on your personality type and how you have learned to respond to pressure.

Symptoms

Work-related stress can cause both physical and emotional health problems. It can cause you to be more prone to physical symptoms such as:

• headaches

• muscular tension

• backache and/or neck ache

• tiredness and sleep problems

• digestive problems

• a raised heart rate

• skin rashes

• sweating

• blurred vision

You may also be prone to psychological symptoms such as:

• a lower sex drive (libido)

• feeling that you can't cope

• irritability and mood swings

• disturbed eating patterns

• finding it hard to concentrate

• feeling less motivated

How do you know if you have work-related stress?

You may have already noticed some factors contributing to the way you feel. For example, you may feel that you:

• often rush about, trying to be in too many places at once

• miss breaks and take work home with you

• don't have enough time for exercise, relaxation or spending time with your family

According to a study by The Work Foundation, nearly a third of working men say that the demands of their job interfere with their private life and nearly a quarter feel that their work has caused them to neglect their children.

Causes

Work-related stress is also one of the biggest causes of sick leave.

There are a number of factors that can make you feel stressed at work, including:

• poor working conditions

• long working hours

• relationships with colleagues

• lack of job security

• difficult journeys to and from work

• the way the company is managed

• mismatch between the requirements of the job and your own capabilities and needs

• inflexible working hours

• too much or too little responsibility

However, often there is no single cause of work-related stress. Although it can be triggered by sudden, unexpected pressures, it's often the result of a combination of stressful factors that build up over time.

Stress management

Self-help

It's impossible to escape pressure at work altogether, so you need to learn how to manage stress effectively. There are a number of ways you can reduce the negative impact of stress. Most of these involve taking a good look at how you function at work.

One of the most important factors in reducing stress levels is managing your time more effectively. Prioritize tasks, delegate where you can and make sure you don't take on more work than you can handle. Make sure you take regular breaks at work and try to finish one task before you begin another. Here are some other things that you can do yourself.

• Make sure your work environment is comfortable. If it isn't, ask for help from your organization’s health and safety officer.

• If possible, don't work long hours - sometimes projects need extra time, but working long hours over many weeks or months does not generally lead to more or better results at work.

• Take a look at your relationships with your colleagues - do you treat each other with respect and consideration?

• Find out if your organisation offers flexible working hours.

It's in everyone's interest to keep the workplace as stress-free as possible, and generally, organisations want to keep their employees happy and healthy. If companies have good work-life policies, employees are likely to be healthier and happier and so less likely to take time off work.

If you are suffering from work-related stress, it's important to talk directly to your manager about it. Your manager has a duty to take reasonable steps to try to resolve the problem. Explain how you are feeling and discuss your workload. If you find talking about your concerns difficult, it may help to make notes during your discussion.

It's worth asking if your organisation has any policies on harassment, bullying or racism. What does your company consider acceptable? Find out how to challenge these policies from your human resources department and make sure you know what support there is for you if you decide to do this.

There are things you can do outside of work to help reduce your stress levels. These include the following.

• Get enough exercise - this is known to reduce stress and can help you feel better. It's recommended that you do 30 minutes of exercise each day. Choose an activity you enjoy - a brisk walk is ideal.

• Learn relaxation techniques - this can help you sleep better and relieve stress-related physical pains such as stomach pains and headaches. Ask your GP or your local library for details of classes where you can learn helpful techniques.

• Talk about your stress with a friend or member of the family - this is a good way to get your worries off your chest. It can give you a fresh perspective and help to make stressful situations more manageable.

• Don't drink too much alcohol or caffeine, or smoke. Instead of helping, these stimulants will increase your stress levels.

• Eat regular meals and a healthy, balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables.

• At the end of each day, reflect on what you've achieved rather than worrying about future work. Don't be too hard on yourself and remember to take each day as it comes.

Our solution

Our Ultra shoulder wrap along with our other therapeutic wraps are use by employees and employers to help relieve levels of stress.

Our Ultra shoulder wrap fits perfectly around the neck and shoulders and offers a moist penetrating heat and the weight helps relieve the stress in the muscles. This can be worn around the house or as some companies now have these available for employees to use at their workstation at work.

Worksafe BC incorporated the use of our Ultra Shoulder wraps for their employees to use to relieve stress or tension at work.

• Emma Chritensen their corporate ergonomist found that individuals using the wraps had a more relaxed posture while working at their workstations, their shoulders were lower, not hunched up around the ears and productivity increased.

This all natural stress relief wrap penetrates deep into muscles to dissolve stress and soothe aches, moist heat therapy can even help diminish tension headaches.
We have also put together a few of our most popular products as a “Stress relieving first aid kit” at a special price.

www.wildflowersaromatherapy.com
 

Heat packs for fast back pain relief

Heat packs

Back pain relief starts in just 3 minutes, that is how long it takes to warm the Sports Therapy Wrap .
Muscle pain management with the Sports Therapy wrap uses warm moist penetrating heat,
that relieves muscle aches and pains fast and naturally.
The heat wrap can also be used for cold therapy, pop it in the freezer for a couple of hours and it is ready to relieve fresh muscle injuries, I always have 2 heat wraps one that is always in the freezer and the other to pop in the microwave.

Fast back pain relief - Heat pack

What heat is for

Heat is primarily for muscle pain, and for stress relief. Warm Buddy heat packs and heat wraps offer a warm moist penetrating heat, that penetrate the muscle tissue and relieve aches and pains fast  and without the need of any over the counter pain medication.
The trick is knowing what muscle pain is. Muscle causes much more pain than most people are aware of. Some kinds of muscle pain are obvious enough — like the pain you get after the first ski trip of the season, or charlie horses in the night — but these are relatively isolated and obvious examples. Also, heat isn’t especially useful for them. Charlie horses are pretty fast, and for most people a rare problem, thankfully. And that post-exercise muscle soreness is virtually immune to any kind of therapy.
But muscle knots …
When you say that you have “knots in your muscles,” you are actually talking about trigger points. A trigger point is a small patch of contracted, stagnant, swampy muscle tissue. Instead of the whole muscle being in spasm, just a little piece of it is in spasm.
If you’d like to detour and learn much more about trigger points, see
Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome: A guide to the science of muscle pain, with reviews of every possible self-treatment and therapy option, even for the most difficult cases.
Trigger points are likely to be the most common cause of undiagnosed and unexplained aches and pains, especially stubborn or recurrent headaches, neck cricks and backaches. It is a much more common cause of pain than the more widely reported repetitive strain injuries (RSIs), nerve pain, or herniated disks. Trigger points also complicate essentially all other injuries: they usually appear in response to other kinds of pain and dysfunction, and then often begin to overshadow the original problem.
And heat is a good therapy for trigger points.

What heat is not for

Never apply heat to a fresh injury! Really. Just don’t do it! That’s what icing is for. Ice is for injuries.
And what’s a “fresh” injury? Any time tissue has been physically damaged, it will be inflamed for a few days, give or take, depending on the seriousness of the injury. If superficial tissue is sensitive to touch, if the skin is hot and red, if there is swelling, these are all signs that your injury is still fresh, and should not be heated.
Here’s an example of what can happen when you heat an inflamed injury: When I was still in school, and my father had not yet learned to call me before asking a doctor about his aches and pains, he went to a drop-in clinic following a traumatic knee injury. The physician on duty prescribed heat! This is shockingly wrong, but the results spoke loud and clear: his knee swelled dramatically, outrageously, causing severe pain and immobility.
Bear in mind that heating is for muscle knots or trigger points and muscle spasm, but not for physically injured muscle — muscle strains, pulled muscles, torn muscles. Damaged muscle is usually inflamed, not in spasm, and trigger points are a minor factor in the aftermath of the injury. It’s usually obvious that you’ve torn muscle because there is always a very clear, nasty “oh shit” moment of trauma, where you know — instantly — that something has gone quite wrong.
However, you may be understandably confused about the difference between spasms, knots, tears, etc., especially if you have back pain, where it can and does sometimes get all mixed together. People routinely believe that their backs and necks are injured when in fact they are just suffering from trigger points. I have other articles devoted to clearing up this confusion.
If you think you have a muscle strain, but you’re not sure, a great article for helping you sort it out is Save Yourself from Muscle Strain!
If back pain is your issue and your not sure what’s causing it, get thee to Save Yourself from Low Back Pain!
And the article (Almost) Never Use Ice on Low Back Pain! is specifically devoted to helping people understand why heating back pain is almost always better than icing it.

How heat works

It’s not scientifically clear exactly why heat is such a treat. However, a good guess is that there are several minor positive effects that add up to … therapy. Most of these effects are also beneficial in other ways. Not incredibly beneficial, and not even notably different from icing: for instance, a 2010 study showed quite clearly that both ice packs and hot packs were beneficial for neck and back pain, and about equally so.1 But a small therapeutic effect is still valuable even if it’s small, and there are probably situations where it works even better — after all, these were people with acute pain bad enough that they went to the hospital. They may have been a bit beyond the help of a hot pack!
Trigger points are known to be aggravated by stress (“fight or flight” hormones and neurology). As long as we aren’t overheated to begin with, being warm is a pleasant and comforting sensation. Our comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Overall relaxation usually reduces resting muscle tone. You can have “tight” muscles without actually being in spasm. There are many degrees of increasing muscle tone between relaxed and “spasm.” A true muscle spasm is very strong and painful, like a charlie horse. But many people live in a state of near spasm — their muscles always clenched and exhausted. This state is both uncomfortable in itself, causing the same kind of muscle discomfort that you have when you are exhausted from exercise … but without the endorphins. And of course it also aggravates trigger points. So any reduction in muscle tone is quite helpful. And the reduction in stress hormones makes it a more therapeutic (lasting) effect, as opposed to just momentary symptom relief.
Our comfort zone is a warm place. Heat almost always relaxes you overall.
Although scientists don’t really understand the physiology of why trigger points come and go, they have certainly identified why they hurt — the stagnant, swampy tissue fluids inside a trigger point are a disgusting bath for nerve endings. Heat facilitates circulation somewhat, helping to wash away metabolic waste products, and bring fresh oxygen and nutrients to the area. No one knows how strong this effect is.
As with everything about trigger points, there are many (many) variables, and consequently it is very hard to study, and everyone gets different results. But heat seems to have enough relevant benefits that many people get at least temporary, partial relief from trigger point pain by heating. And some people find it downright curative.

Warm Buddy - Stress Relief - Heat Wrap

 Warm Buddy Shoulder wrap for fast stress relief

The best Neck & shoulder pain heated neck wrap, also used for stress and tension relief.
Neck pain & stress relief heat wrap - Warm moist penetrating heat. Can be used hot or cold
People who suffer from shoulder pain rely on our shoulder wrap to ease these aches and pains naturally.

Stress relief shoulder wrap

Stress has a physical effect on the body. When you suffer from anxiety, you're putting your body through extensive, long term stress. Your body is in fight or flight mode, and that means that it's releasing hormones that tense muscles and create an overall feeling of general unpleasantness that, in many ways, contributes to further anxiety.
Neck pain is one of the symptoms caused by persistent anxiety. It doesn't occur with everyone – very few anxiety symptoms occur in everyone – but many do experience a degree of neck pain that ranges anywhere from slightly irritating to severe, all as a result of their anxiety symptoms.

Neck Pain = Anxiety?

Neck pain is a very real, very common anxiety symptom. Unfortunately, some people experience such a degree of neck pain stiffness that they actually become more anxious, and increase their neck pain experience.
The good news is that you can cure your neck pain forever. Don't just manage it. Get rid of it.

Heat packs for back pain relief

  Warm moist penetrating heat pain relief

Back pain relief using heat therapy

Warm Buddy make a variety of excellent heat pads for back pain.

The best heat pad for back pain

The most popular one is the sports therapy wrap this can be use hot or cold depending on what therapy is required, I usually have 2 of these wraps at hand, one is always in the freezer so I can use it at a moments notice and the other one is ready to pop into the microwave for 3 minutes and then give you an hour or more of warm moist penetrating heat that will relieve those muscle aches and pains really fast.

We do have other heat packs that are in different shapes and sizes.
Many athlete use these for their muscle maintenance as it is important to keep muscles warm prior to any warm up activities and should they suffer any muscle injury the sports therapy wrap is their wrap of choice.
WA+G
Short video on heat pads for back pain