Can Stress Increase Productivity?
Pushing someone to do something might sound like the best way to get things done, on time. But does that give the outcome with the expected quality? May be or Maybe not.
Also, can we treat stress as something evil? It depends. It depends on which type of stress we are talking about. There are 3 types of stress.
1.Acute stress
It’s the most common type of stress.
Definition: Reaction to the demands and pressure from the recent past as well as for the expected demands and pressure from the near future.
Experiencing acute stress in small doses can give you a boost of adrenaline and make you happy. Also, overdoing acute stress can still hurt you. However, since acute stress is short term it does not get enough time to make significant damage to your body.
2. Episodic Acute Stress
Episodic Acute Stress happens when you suffer from acute stress too often and too long.
This can happen to people who are always in a hurry, running late, takes a lot of responsibilities and having a hard time organizing things.
Unlike Acute stress, Episodic Acute stress can cause migraines, chest pain, and heart disease. To deal with this kind of stress, one might need professional help.
3. Chronic Stress
Chronic stress is the type of stress that makes people fade away day by day.
It’s defined as the stress of Poverty, Broken Family, Unhappy Marriage or Hated Job.
It happens when you cannot find a solution for a tragic situation and can result in suicide, violence and heart attack. It’s difficult to recover without medical help.
So that’s about the types of stress and you might be having an idea about which type of stress can be used to increase productivity at work.
Yes, Acute stress. There is a list of benefits from acute stress, which makes you think that stress is not so evil in the end. Such as:
- Greater Brain Power
- Stronger Immune System
- Reinforced Resilience
- Enhanced Learning
- Increased Focus
- Creativity Boost
- Goal Achieved
- Self-Confidence
- Social Bonding
- Problem Solving Skills Improved
Sounds great right? Um.. some of you who read this will agree but some of you may find it as utter nonsense. While I am happy for the ones who agree with the above facts, I feel those who don’t agree.
It says stress boosts your creativity but you have been experiencing a creative burn out for weeks or months now. It says stress tightens the social bonding but you have been just avoiding people as much as possible and laying in your bed doing nothing. It says stress increases focus but you noticed that you have missed details in your work and makes you re-think your problem-solving skills and has led you to self-doubt instead of self-confidence.
Why?
Your workplace may or may not cause acute stress, which is the harmless, productivity boost. But the question is do they know their employees well enough? Do they know who is experiencing financial difficulties, broken families, unhappy marriages and who is not happy with the job they do and simply experiencing chronic stress? Unless you have a great culture at your workplace, I highly doubt it.
While the theories praise Acute stress to boost productivity, it is not a good idea to use the same dose of acute stress for everyone. Because, you never know the behind the scenes of your best-performing employee, most entertaining employee and most hard-working employee. Because in modern society we all are masters of hiding our emotional states due to various reasons. It could be because you need to be successful in your career so that you can get rid of the financial and personal problems which are draining you, or it could be because you don’t need to be seen as a weak individual or could be anything in your mind.
So at the end of the day, not all people influenced by stress, some might perform well when they are being taken care of, some might perform well when they feel that they are part of a team, etc.
If you still want to use stress to get things done, you should know which dose for each individual and make sure it’s not long term. Caring, understanding, and acceptance will always beat the stress in the game of boosting productivity.
If you are someone on the other side of this problem, maybe you can enforce processes that will not use stress as a productivity boost because there are plenty of ways to encourage people in a more healthy manner. If you are someone experiencing this and have no control over it, here are a few things that you can do.
- Learn to think that your work is not you.
- Always try to think positive: Believe that stress is useful rather than harmful
- Plan your days to feel in control and not to feel overwhelmed.
- Prioritize your to-do list
- Find a way to laugh more, with friends or watch a funny movie
- Meditate
- Do yoga or any form of exercise regularly.
- Talk about how you feel or write them down.
However, no one should contribute to pushing someone to their edge knowingly or unknowingly as well as, no one should simply give up. Rise up, change from within, change yourself or change situations because, at the end of the day, life is worth living than suffering from things that drain you.
Let’s just be more kind, caring and let’s make people feel included rather than cornering them with a lot of pressure.
“In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
Special thanks to Emily Johnsons for the information on types of stress.
☕️ As a writer living in Sri Lanka, I don’t have the option to join Medium Partner Program. So if you find this article helpful, Buy me a coffee.
