Stress Diaries
Identifying Causes of Short-Term Stress
Whether stress is caused by rush-hour traffic, a heavy workload, difficult customers, or unpleasant news, many of us experience it in some form during the day. The problem is that if stress goes unchecked, it can affect our productivity and, worse still, our health.
This is where keeping a Stress Diary can be useful. Stress Diaries are important for understanding the causes of short-term stress in your life. They also give you an important insight into how you react to stress, and they help you to identify the levels of pressure at which you prefer to operate. (After all, a little bit of pressure can be a good thing!)
The idea behind Stress Diaries is that, on a regular basis, you record information about the stresses you're experiencing, so that you can analyze these stresses and then manage them. This is important because often these stresses flit in and out of our minds without getting the attention and focus that they deserve.
As well as helping you capture and analyze the most common sources of stress in your life, Stress Diaries help you to understand:
- The causes of stress in more detail.
- The levels of pressure at which you operate most effectively.
- How you may be able to improve the way you manage stress.
Using the Tool
To get started, download our free Stress Diary template and make regular entries in your Stress Diary (for example, every hour). If you have any difficulty remembering to do this, set an alarm to remind you to make your next diary entry.
Also, make an entry in your diary after any stressful incidents.
Every time you make an entry, record the following information:
- The date and time of the entry.
- The most recent stressful event you experienced.
- How happy you feel now, using a subjective assessment on a scale of -10 (the most unhappy you've ever been) to +10 (the happiest you've been). As well as this, write down the mood you're feeling.
- How effectively you're working now (a subjective assessment, on a scale of 0 to 10). A 0 here would show complete ineffectiveness, while a 10 would show the greatest effectiveness you have ever achieved.
- The fundamental cause of the stress (being as honest and objective as possible).
You may also want to note:
- The symptoms you felt (for example, "butterflies in the stomach," anger, headache, raised pulse rate, sweaty palms, and so on.).
- How well you handled the event: Did your reaction help solve the problem, or did it actually make things worse?
Analyzing the Diary
Once you've kept a Stress Diary for a number of days, you can analyze it and take action on it:
- First, look at the different stresses you experienced during the time you kept your diary. Highlight the most frequent stresses, and also the ones that were most unpleasant.
- Working through the stresses you've highlighted, look at your assessments of their underlying causes, and your appraisal of how well you handled the stressful event. Do these highlight problems that need to be fixed? If so, list these areas.
- Next, look through your diary at the situations that cause you stress. List ways in which you can change these situations for the better.
- Finally, look at how you felt when you were under pressure, and explore how it affected your happiness and your effectiveness. Was there a middle level of pressure at which you were happiest and performed best?
Having analyzed your diary, you should fully understand what the most important and frequent sources of stress are in your life, and you should appreciate the levels of pressure at which you are happiest. You should also know the sort of situations that cause you stress, so that you can prepare for them and manage them well.
Note:
You'll reap the real benefits of having a Stress Diary in the first few weeks that you use it. After this, you may find that you have better uses for your time.
If, however, your lifestyle changes, or you begin to suffer from stress again, then it may be worth using the diary approach one more time. You'll probably find that the stresses you face have changed.
Next Steps
Your next step is to get your stress under control.
Start by looking at the people and events that cause the most stress for you.
Tip:
Some stresses will be unavoidable, especially if you're in a job with lots of responsibility. Our article on Cognitive Restructuring can help you to reduce stress by changing the way that you think about things.
More Tips and Resources
- Listen to our Expert Interview "Take the Stress Out of Your Life" with Dr. Jay Winner. He offers some great tips for eliminating stress and putting more relaxation into your day.
- Use imagery during your day to relax and reduce stress.
- Consider taking a vacation . Keep in mind that although the people or tasks causing your stress will still be waiting for you when you get back, a vacation can give you enough distance to relax, refresh, and come up with some effective solutions.
- Meditation can be very effective for dealing with stress, even if you can only meditate for five minutes at a time. Our article, Meditation for Stress Management , shows you how to start using this technique.
- Are you getting enough sleep ? Most people need 7-8 hours of sleep to stay healthy and productive. A lack of sleep can definitely contribute to your stress level.
- Do you find it difficult to "switch off" at end of the day? Learn how to relax after a hard day .
- Our Bite-Sized Training session on Stress Busters can help you deal with stress by showing you how to relax in situations where you have no control.
Note:
Stress can cause severe health problems and, in extreme cases, can cause death. While these stress management techniques have been shown to have a positive effect on reducing stress, they are for guidance only. Seek the advice of a qualified health professional if you have any concerns over stress-related illnesses, or if stress is causing significant or persistent unhappiness.
Key Points
Stress Diaries help you to get a good understanding of the routine, short-term stresses that you experience in your life. Using them, you can identify the most important, and most frequent, stresses that you experience, so that you can concentrate your efforts on these. They also help you to identify areas where you need to improve your stress management skills, and let you to understand the levels of stress at which you are happiest, and most effective.
To keep a Stress Diary, download our worksheet and make a regular diary entry, for example, every hour. Also make entries after stressful events.
Analyze the diary to identify the most frequent and most serious stresses that you experience. Use it also to identify areas where you can improve your management of stress.
Download Worksheet
Zeroing In on What Your Job's About
We have all experienced that appalling sense of having far too much work to do and too little time to do it in. We can choose to ignore this, and work unreasonably long hours to stay on top of our workload. The alternative is to work more intelligently, by focusing on the things that are important for job success and reducing the time we spend on low priority tasks.
Job Analysis is the first step in doing this, and it's a key technique for managing job overload – an important source of stress.
To do an excellent job, you need to understand fully what is expected of you. While this may seem obvious, in the hurly-burly of a new, fast-moving, high-pressure role, it is oftentimes something that is easy to overlook.
By understanding the priorities in your job, and what constitutes success within it, you can focus on these activities and minimize work on other tasks as much as possible. This helps you get the greatest return from the work you do, and keep your workload under control.
Job Analysis is a useful technique for getting a firm grip on what really is important in your job so that you are able to perform excellently. It helps you to cut through clutter and distraction to get to the heart of what you need to do.
Note that this tool takes two forms – the short-form we discuss here assumes that your organization is already well organized and that its job descriptions, review criteria and incentives are well-aligned and correct. The long-form (discussed within our Stress Management Masterclass), helps you to deal with jobs where this is not the case – here, inconsistent job design can cause enormous stress.
Using the Tool
To conduct a job analysis, go through the following steps:
1. Review Formal Job Documentation
- Look at your job description. Identify the key objectives and priorities within it.
- Look at the forms for the periodic performance reviews. These show precisely the behaviors that will be rewarded and, by implication, show those that will be punished.
- Find out what training is available for the role. Ensure that you attend appropriate training so that you know as much as possible about what you need to know.
- Look at incentive schemes to understand the behaviors that these reward.
2. Understand the Organization's Strategy and Culture
Your job exists for a reason – this will ultimately be determined by the strategy of the organizational unit you work for. This strategy is often expressed in a mission statement. In some way, what you do should help the organization achieve its mission (if it does not, you have to ask yourself how secure the job is!). Make sure you understand and perform well the tasks that contribute to the strategy.
Similarly, every organization has its own culture – its own, historically developed values, rights and wrongs, and things that it considers to be important. If you are new to an organization, talk through with established, respected members of staff to understand these values.
Make sure that you understand this culture. Make sure that your actions reinforce the company's culture, or at least do not go against it. Looked at through the lens of culture, will the company value what you do?
Check that your priorities are consistent with this mission statement and the company culture.
3. Find Out Who the Top Achievers are, and Understand Why They are Successful
Inside or outside the organization, there may be people in a similar role to you who are seen as highly successful. Find out how they work, and what they do to generate this success. Look at what they do, and learn from them. Understand what skills make them successful, and learn those skills.
4. Check You Have the People and Resources to do the Job
The next step is to check that you have the staff support, resources and training needed to do an excellent job. If you do not, start work on obtaining them.
5. Confirm Priorities With Your Boss
By this stage, you should have a thorough understanding of what your job entails, and what your key objectives are. You should also have a good idea of the resources that you need, and any additional training you may need to do the best you can.
This is the time to talk the job through with your boss, and confirm that you share an understanding of what constitutes good performance in the role.
It is also worth talking through serious inconsistencies, and agreeing how these can be managed.
6. Take Action
You should now know what you have to do to be successful in your job. You should have a good idea of the most important things that you have to do, and also the least important.
Where you can drop the less-important tasks, do so. Where you can de-prioritize them, do so.
Where you need more resource or training to do your job, negotiate for this.
Remember to be a little sensitive in the way you do this: Good teamwork often means helping other people out with jobs that do not benefit you. However, do not let people take advantage of you: Be assertive in explaining that you have your own work to do. If you cannot drop tasks, delegate them or negotiate longer time scales.
Key Points
Job analysis is a five-step technique for:
- Understanding and agreeing how to achieve peak performance in your job.
- Ensuring that you and your boss agree on the areas you should concentrate on when time gets tight; and the areas that can be de-emphasized during this time.
- Making sure that you have the resources, training and staff needed to do a good job.
By using the Job Analysis technique, you should gain a good understanding of how you can excel at your job. You should also understand your job priorities.
This helps you to manage the stress of job overload by helping to decide which jobs you should drop.
Job Analysis is just one of many practical action-oriented techniques for reducing the stress of job overload. These and other types of technique help you to resolve structural problems within jobs, work more effectively with your boss and powerful people, improve the way your teams function and become more assertive so that other people respect your right not to take on an excessive workload. These are all important techniques for bringing job stress under control, for improving the quality of your working life, and for achieving career success.
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