""I've got a super stressful week coming up," Adam, a project manager, announced in our Monday session. "We're meeting with our most important and most difficult client on Thursday afternoon. I'm dreading it." He sighed. "My job is really stressful." Adam slept poorly all week, was irritable and impatient with his assistant, fretted about the meeting when he was home, and snapped at his kids, causing his wife to shoot him a glare. A single meeting had hijacked his nervous system for the entire week."
""The Problem with Defining Your Job as Stressful Our nervous system doesn't distinguish well between real threats and anticipated ones. By describing your job (or your week) as "very stressful," you're sending a signal to your brain to anticipate stress all day, every day. Your body will respond to that signal by releasing stress hormones as if danger is indeed present all the time, keeping you in a constant state of fight-or-flight all day, every day, and putting you at risk for burnout.""
Labeling a job or upcoming period as "very stressful" primes the nervous system to anticipate danger, producing continuous stress-hormone release and prolonged fight-or-flight activation. Anticipatory stress can be more damaging than isolated stressful events, undermining sleep, mood, relationships, and resilience. Repeated catastrophic labels convert single stressful moments into pervasive beliefs that keep the body on high alert even on light days. Reducing work stress requires more accurate, nuanced thinking rather than denial: distinguish real threats from temporary challenges, stop repetitive catastrophic labeling, and allow physiological safety signals to restore balance.
Read at Psychology Today
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