Jobs and careers are an important part of our lives. Even “dream jobs” have stressful deadlines, performance expectations, and other responsibilities. For some, stress is the motivator that ensures things get done. However, job stress also frequently causes burnout, a condition marked by emotional exhaustion and negative or cynical attitudes toward others and yourself.

Fortunately, there are many ways to help manage job-related stress. Read the article to know what you can do to combat job stress.

Dr Karl Albrecht, a pioneer in the development of stress-reduction training for businesspeople, defined four common types of stress. They are:

1. Time stress.
2. Anticipatory stress.
3. Situational stress.
4. Encounter stress.

Let’s look at each of these types of stress in detail, and discuss how you can identify and deal with each one.

1. Time Stress

You experience time stress when you worry about lack of time. You worry about the number of things that you have to do, and you fear that you’ll fail to achieve something important. You might feel trapped, unhappy, or even hopeless. Common examples of time stress include worrying about deadlines or rushing to avoid being late for a meeting.

Managing Time Stress

• First, learn good time management skills.
• Next, make sure that you understand the difference between important and urgent things to do. Unfortunately, it’s easy to get caught up in seemingly urgent tasks which actually have little impact on your overall objectives. This can leave you feeling exhausted, or feeling that you worked a full day yet accomplished nothing meaningful.
• Also, make sure that you’re polite but assertiveabout saying «no» to tasks that you don’t have the capacity to do.

 2. Anticipatory Stress

Anticipatory stress describes stress that you experience concerning the future. Sometimes this stress can be focused on a specific event, such as an upcoming presentation that you’re going to give. However, anticipatory stress can also be vague and undefined, such as an overall sense of dread about the future, or a worry that «something will go wrong or is going to happen.»

Managing Anticipatory Stress

• First, concentrate on what’s happening right now, rather than on an imagined future.
• Next, put in extra time to prepare for the event. Addressing these personal fears directly will lower your stress.
• Also, learn how to overcome a fear of failure by making contingency plans and analyzing all of the possible outcomes, you’ll get a clearer idea of what could happen in the future. This can help diminish your fear of failure and give you a greater sense of control over events.
• Last, use positive visualization techniques to imagine the situation going right. Research showsthat your mind often can’t tell the difference, on a basic neurological level, between a situation that you’ve visualized going well repeatedly and one that’s actually happened.

3. Situational Stress

You experience situational stress when you’re in a scary situation that you have no control over. This could be an emergency. More commonly, however, it’s a situation that involves conflict, or a loss of status or acceptance in the eyes of your group.

Managing Situational Stress

• First, learn to be more self-aware. This means recognizing the «automatic» physical and emotional signals that your body sends out when you’re under pressure. For example, imagine that the meeting you’re in suddenly dissolves into a shouting match between team members. Your automatic response is to feel a surge of anxiety. Your stomach knots and feels bloated.
• Next, learn effective conflict resolution skills as conflict is a major source of situational stress, so that you’re well-prepared to handle the stress of conflict when it arises.
• Also, learn to manage your emotions. The best way to do it is to try to recognize the coming emotional tide moments before you actually burst into it. If you manage it, you’ll separate yourself from it, that is you won’t associate yourself with your, for example, anger. When you are able to watch your feelings, you gain control over them.

4. Encounter Stress

Encounter stress revolves around people. You experience encounter stress when you worry about interacting with a certain person or group of people – you may not like them, or you might think that they’re unpredictable.

Encounter stress can also occur if your role involves a lot of personal interactions with customers or clients, especially if those groups are in distress. For instance, physicians and social workers have high rates of encounter stress, because the people they work with routinely don’t feel well, or are deeply upset.

This type of stress also occurs from «contact overload»: when you feel overwhelmed or drained from interacting with too many people.

Managing Encounter Stress

• A good place to start is to develop greater emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize the emotions, wants, and needs of yourself and of others. This is an important skill in interacting with others and in building good relationships.
• Empathy is a valuable skill for coping with this type of stress, because it allows you to see the situation from the other person’s perspective. This gives you greater understanding and helps you to structure your communications so that you address the other person’s feelings, wants, and needs.

Know when you’re about to reach your limit for interactions in the day. Everyone has different symptoms for encounter stress, but a common one is withdrawing psychologically from others and working mechanically. Another common symptom is getting cranky, cold, or impersonal with others in your interactions. When you start to experience these symptoms, do whatever you can to take a break. Go for a walk, drink water, and practice deep breathing exercises.