Finally, you can work on your interpersonal relationships to reduce and prevent stressful situations from occurring. For example, if fighting with your spouse, significant other, friend, or family causes you large amounts of stress, you should proactively try to avoid or resolve conflicts that tend to escalate from repeated arguments or patterns of behavior. Another personal example: when my mother received calls from work during the weekend, my father would argue that my mother worked too much and was not compensated fairly. My mother would push back and state that she had an important obligation to keep the store running and that my dad didn’t understand. The argument would escalate and my father would tell my mother that she was married to her job. This same argument was repeated many times over the years. The point is that while arguing raised both my mother and father’s blood pressure, they never took steps to resolve or mitigate the conflict. My mother could have found a non-intrusive way to handle the needs of the store over the weekends, while my father could have agreed to cut my mom some slack. For many, including myself, stress from interpersonal relationships and life dwarfs stress from work, and a lot of stress can be avoided by working on those interpersonal relationships.

Stress from life and personal relationships can exceed work stress and can impact your performance.

The bottom line is that you can identify the things in your life that cause you stress and take steps to proactively mitigate or avoid them.

   Send article as PDF