Here's why work stress is actually a good thing

The key: you have to think like an athlete.


Anxiety at work, like everywhere else in life, is not generally considered a good thing. Feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do - or highlight your ability to complement a given task - can make you paralyze with fear, cause you to whip customers or colleagues, andeven make you develop cancer and other diseases further on the road.

All this is always true and 72% of Americans who undergo an anxiety daily say that it interferes with their work and their personal lives. CornA new study published in theApplied Psychology Journalfound that a moderate anxiety level can actually help strengthen your work performance.

"If you have too much anxiety and you are not completely consumed by that, it will make your performance tap," said Julie McCarthy, an expert on organizational behavior and the co-author of the study of the University of Toronto. "On the other hand, moderate levels of anxiety can facilitate and conduct performance."

The key - and this is crucial - is to exploit anxiety instead of letting it take. Bonnie Hayden Cheng, Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong and leader of the study, compared to athletes, who are trained to their anxiety to regulate their behavior and focus on the task to be performed.

This is called self-regulatory treatment, and it consists of establishing desirable standards of behavior, the motivation to meet these standards, to monitor all the thoughts that can prevent these standards and to develop the willingness of Check the desires that lead to the realization of your goals.

Moderate anxiety, Cheng supports, contributes to the third stage of the self-regulatory process.

"After all, if we have no anxiety and we just do not care about performance, we will not be motivated to do the job," Cheng said.

Of course, as anyone suffering from anxiety knows too well, the management of it takes a good amount of inner strength, self-awareness and emotional intelligence, but it can be done.

"The management of anxiety can be made by recognizing and addressing triggers of work anxiety, but also to know how to take advantage of the performance," said Cheng.

The study, which has drawn its conclusions of past theories of anxiety, exhaustion of resources, cognitive motivation and performance processing, not only has the consequences for self-improvement individual, but also for potential training That companies might want to adopt to help employees use their anxiety to get the best possible results on their work.

For more scientific advice on how to boost your performance, checkWhy work on senior office floors affects your decision-making. And if you suffer from intense stress at work, check30 ways to disaffect in just 30 seconds (or less!).

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