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Stress is inevitable. Life is full of potential stressors. On any given day (or week, or year), the amount of stress affecting you or your staff and colleagues may vary in intensity and frequency, but a stress-free existence is almost impossible. Your body has a protective mechanism for reacting to a perceived threat: the stress response. Your nervous and endocrine systems engage in a complex set of processes to safely navigate what it deems an imminent danger, whether that’s a car speeding toward you or a deadline. This is a natural and valuable physiological occurrence. After the multifaceted preparedness of the stress response, your parasympathetic nervous system takes over, returning your body to a more relaxed state. This process is naturally self-limiting, designed to resolve automatically. So why do we think of stress as bad? Stress—much like criticism, feedback, and other supposed workplace negatives—can be problematic if not understood. But, when properly managed and optimized, stress, like criticism, can be a tool for change and a driver of positive action. Are you or your team stressed out? Accurate Staffing can provide qualified temporaries to alleviate overwork, keep employees happy and help you rest a little easier. Trying to eliminate stress is not a method of managing it. Change your thinking from “must reduce stress” to “must handle stress more effectively,” and you will start recognizing stress as potentially purposeful, helpful, and a catalyst. The stress response itself is a finely tuned problem solver. When your body reflexively engages it, you automatically and actively assess and adapt to a potentially troublesome situation. Framed that way, you can see stress as a positive tool for moving forward, avoiding hazards, and learning from your environment and experiences. Learning to be aware of your stress is key: Not everyone has the same stress triggers. Your sensitivity to stressors before the response kicks in is different from other people’s. Life experiences and genetics play a role in how you tolerate stress. Learning to effectively manage stress is about recognizing and intervening when the stress response is continuously activated. Acute (sudden, short-term) stress that follows the pattern of stressor > stress response > recovery state is less disruptive than chronic (systemic, long-term) stress in which the natural return to baseline doesn’t have a chance to happen. Chronic stress causes your body to remain flooded with cortisol, adrenaline, and fight-or-flight hormones without a return to normal levels, which makes it harder to function productively and puts your health at risk. But short-term stress can be invigorating and beneficial if it’s well-managed. There are many strategies for harnessing stress so it becomes a useful tool for growth. Being understaffed is a stressor for the entire organization. Existing staff feel overworked, overly stressed, resentful, and eventually burned out. This may lead to increased turnover, exacerbating the short-staffing problem and perpetuating the burden on current employees. Partnering with a staffing firm will help you mitigate understaffing as well as bring in quality candidates who should be able to hit the ground running. By utilizing a staffing company to take care of recruiting candidates, vetting applicants, and onboarding new hires, your HR team will not only be less stressed but will be better able to focus on other administrative functions, such as enhancing employee benefits packages, which will optimize stress levels overall. Make a staffing firm your ally so that stress is not an adversary. Contact Accurate Staffing today to make staffing and hiring easier.Reframe your view of stress
Develop Stress Self-Awareness and Know Acute vs. Chronic
How to optimize stress levels for better performance
How a staffing partner can help