Managing Stress for Creativity versus Succumbing to Stress for Survival
A company’s vision and growth are directly dependent on the employee and employer’s state of physical wellbeing and attitude to drive success. In one’s daily life,stress is an inevitable part that comes in various degrees with work, personal matters, internal struggle, and more. Prolonged stress negatively impact one’s wellbeing, therefore it is crucial for businesses to encourage healthy stress management among their employees to promote corporate wellbeing.
Stress is mental or emotional strain as a result of adverse situation. When there is a threat to our wellbeing either physically or emotionally, our fight or flight instinct kicks in and a majority of body’s energy are consumed by cortex in the brain, thus resulting in the feeling of “burned out” or “drained out”.
We experience mild stress on a daily basis and each has our own technique to overcome the stress. However, when stress intensifies and persists long term,it induces negative emotions such as fear, mistrust, anger, hatred, etc., which create a level of extended disconnection and narrow our consciousness.
Furthermore, negative emotions directly impact on the production of stress hormones called Cortisol, which plays a role in depleting our cognitive ability to solve problems, process new information, and could even compromises the immune system. Therefore, stress management techniques are very important to individual and collective wellbeing.
High stress level pushes us to live on survival mode that drags us to a vicious cycle of misery, cloudy judgements, and disappointment. This drains our energy and limits our ability to think and innovate. Therefore, being motivated to consciously change our emotions will not only reduces our stress level but also help us creating new opportunities, expand our vision, ability to innovate and think beyond possibilities. With low stress level, we are open to live in creativity mode and flourish.
This article is a part of Frost & Sullivan Liberating Corporate Consciousness series. In next article, I will be discussing how to create positive emotions by Practicing Conscious discipline. Join me in my journey to centralise Corporate Consciousness in business practices and promote wellbeing among the employees, in the workplace, and the surrounding community.