All the potential stressors that we have examined so far, including time pressures, other people, and confining roles, converge in the work arena. They can be sorely compounded by our need to make money. Most of us have to do something to earn a living, and most jobs are at least potentially stressful in a variety of ways. But work is also a way of connecting with the larger world, a way of doing something useful, of making some kind of contribution of labor and effort to a meaningful endeavor, which hopefully has its own rewards beyond those of merely a paycheck. The sense of contributing something, perhaps by feeding people, or helping them get where they need to go, or caring for their health, or being of help in other ways—a sense of creating, of putting our knowledge and skills to work—can help us to feel a part of something bigger, something worth working for. If we could see our own work in this way, it might make it more tolerable, even under difficult circumstances, or better still, deeply satisfying.
People who can’t work at all because of illness or injury often feel they would give anything to be working again, to not have to stay in bed or go stir-crazy around the house. When you are limited in your ability to get out and connect in this way, almost any job can seem worth having. We often forget or take for granted that work can lend meaning and coherence to our lives. The meaning and coherence it provides are in proportion to how much we care about and believe in it. And in periods of high unemployment, of course, the need for work and the indignities and travails of being laid off and of not being able to find another job, or to have to work for a much lower salary than before at something one may not want to be doing, creates enormous levels of personal as well as family and social stress in our society.
As we know, some jobs are particularly demeaning and exploitative. Some working conditions are highly toxic to either physical or psychological health or both. Work can be dangerous to your health. Some studies show that men (these particular studies were done on men) in jobs that have little decision-making latitude but high standards of performance—such as a waiter, an office computer operator, or a short-order cook—show a higher prevalence of heart attacks than men in jobs with more control. This is true independent of age and other factors, such as cigarette smoking.
But even if you have a job with a lot of autonomy and a good salary and you are doing things that you care about, even love to do, work always presents its unique challenges and lets you know that you are never completely in control, even if you think you are. The law of impermanence still applies. Things still change. You can’t control that. There are always people or forces that can disrupt your work, threaten your job and your role, or make what you said one day “inoperable” the next, no matter how much power you may think you have accumulated. Moreover, there are usually intrinsic limits to how much you can do to change things or resist certain changes within organizations and industries, even if it objectively looks as if you have a lot of power and influence. Just think for a moment about how difficult it is, even if you wanted to, to regulate Wall Street and the global financial industry for the sake of stability. Even the president of the United States is unable to do it, and may not want to. Think of the recession of 2008, triggered and then compounded by clever people in the banking industry and the housing market intoxicated by the prospect of selling houses on a massive level to people who they knew couldn’t afford them, ultimately draining the savings of so much of the world’s middle class and putting so many people out of work. Balance and a measure of sanity may eventually be restored, but the harm to individual people can be colossal, and lasting. And this tends to happen in cycles because the collective memory for such object lessons in business and finance is very short. This itself is a kind of disease, brought on by the human mind when it loses its moral compass, as can happen so easily in work settings under all the competing pressures to “succeed,” and to “grow the business.”
At the level of the individual person at work, job stress, insecurity, frustration, and failure can be experienced in any job and at any pay grade, from janitor to chief executive, from waiter, factory worker, or bus driver to lawyer, doctor, scientist, police chief, or politician. Many jobs are intrinsically stressful, as we have seen, because of the combination of low decision-making latitude and high responsibility. To correct this requires reorganizing the job itself or compensating the employees better to make it more tolerable. Yet, given that many job descriptions will not be rewritten in the short run to lower employee stress, people are forced to cope as best they can using their own resources. The degree to which you are affected by such stressful circumstances can be influenced positively by your own coping skills. As we saw in Part III, the level of psychological stress you experience depends on how you interpret things—in other words, on your attitude, on whether you are able to flow with change or, on the other hand, make every ripple in the way things are unfolding into an occasion for fighting or worrying or falling into despair.
If we are not careful, we can burn out at any job, no matter how much control and decision-making authority it looks like we have. Often it is because we are entrained over time to try to get more and more and even more done in the finite twenty-four hours that each of us has, no matter what. This is especially so in this era of the unending barrage of electronic communications that are driving work, or more likely, if we are not careful, impeding it, in the sense of our getting any real work done, so caught up are we in self-distraction and in multitasking, which just reduce our capacity to get anything done well. Tony Schwartz, author and longtime student of performance and excellence in business, writes in the New York Times that studies show that “paradoxically, the best way to get more done may be to spend more time doing less.… strategic renewal—including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office, and longer and more frequent vacations—boosts productivity, job performance, and, of course, health.” In other words, we have to develop personal strategies for conserving our energy and attention, renewing those resources, and avoid perpetually distracting ourselves, or working so continuously that our actual performance suffers. And obviously, it takes moment-to-moment awareness of what is happening within us and around us to be able to shift our relationship to it all in a healthier direction. But it is easier said than done unless we are practicing mindfulness in all aspects of our lives.
If you have a job, to cope effectively with work stress practically requires that you look at your situation with eyes of wholeness, no matter what the particulars of your employment may be. It can help keep things in perspective if you ask yourself from time to time, “What is the job I am really doing and how can I best do it under the circumstances I find myself in?” As we have seen, we can easily fall into ruts in our roles, especially if we have held the same job for a long time. If we do not guard against it, we may stop seeing each moment as new, each day as an adventure. Instead, we may become susceptible to feeling drowned in the repetitiveness and predictability of each day. We may find ourselves resisting innovation and change and becoming overly protective of what we have built because we feel threatened by new ideas or changing standards and rules, or by new people coming in.
It is not uncommon for us to operate on autopilot in our work in the same way that we do at other times in our lives. Why should we expect to be fully awake and living in the moment at work if mindfulness is not something we value in our lives as a whole? As we have seen, the automatic pilot mode may get us through our days, but it won’t help us with the feeling of being worn down by all the pressures, the routines, the monotony and sameness of what we may be doing from day to day, especially if we feel alienated from its larger purpose. We can feel just as stuck at work as in other domains in our lives. Or even more so. We may feel that we don’t have alternatives, that we are limited by economic realities, by our own earlier life choices, by all sorts of things that prevent us from changing jobs or advancing or doing what we really want to be doing. But we may not be as stuck as we think. Work stress can be greatly reduced in many cases simply by an intentional commitment to cultivate calmness and awareness in the domain of work and by letting mindfulness guide our actions and our responses to all the stressors we have to deal with or tolerate. We can become less reactive and rely more on our sense of agency.
As we have seen over and over again, our own mind can produce more limitations for us than there are in actuality. While we all live within certain economic realities and the need to make a living doing what we are able to do, we often don’t know what those limits really are, just as we don’t know what the limits of our body’s ability to heal really are. What we do know is that clarity of vision usually doesn’t hurt, and it may provide fresh insights as to what might be possible. We can train ourselves to see openings, and not just limitations and barriers to satisfying change.
Bringing the meditation practice into your work life can make for major improvements in the quality of your life at work no matter what your job. You do not always have to get out of a stressful job for your work life to start to change in positive ways. Sometimes simply deciding, as an experiment, to make your work part of your meditation practice, part of your work on yourself, can shift the balance from a sense of being done in by the job to a sense of knowing what you are doing and choosing to do it. This change in perspective can lead directly to a change in what your job means to you. Work can become a vehicle that you are purposefully using to learn and to grow. Obstacles then become challenges and opportunities, frustrations occasions to practice patience and compassion, what other people are doing or not doing occasions to be assertive and communicate effectively, and power struggles occasions to watch the play of greed, aversion, and unawareness in other people and in yourself. Of course, sometimes you may have to leave a job because it is not worth the effort to pursue such a path, given the circumstances.
When you introduce mindfulness as the thread guiding your seeing and your actions from moment to moment and from day to day, at work, as you get up in the morning and prepare to go to work, and as you leave to come home, work really becomes something you are choosing to do, every day, in a way that goes beyond the necessity of having a job to make money or to “get somewhere” in life. You are bringing the same attitudes that we have been cultivating as the foundation of mindfulness in other aspects of life into your work life in a seamless merging of moments. Rather than having work run your life completely, you are now in a position to be in greater balance with it.
True, there are obligations and responsibilities and pressures that you have to face and deal with, which may be beyond your control, and which may cause you stress, but is that not the same in every other aspect of your life as well? If it were not one set of pressures, would it not be another after a short time? You need to eat. You need connection to the larger world one way or another. There will always be some aspect of the full catastrophe to be faced somewhere, sometime. It is how you face it that matters.
When you begin to look at work mindfully, whether you work for yourself, for a big institution, or for a little one, whether you work inside a building or outside, whether you love your job or hate it, you are bringing all your inner resources to bear on your working day. This will allow you to take more of a problem-solving approach as you go along, and thus to cope better with the stressors at work. Then, even if you come to a point where you have to face a big life transition, perhaps because you were fired from your job or were laid off or you decided to quit or to go out on strike, you will be better prepared to meet these changes, hard as they are, with balance, strength, and awareness. You will be better prepared to handle the emotional turmoil and reactivity that invariably accompany major life crises and transitions. Since you have to go through difficult times anyway if such things happen to you, you might as well have all your resources and strength at your disposal to deal with them as best you can.
Many people come to the Stress Reduction Clinic because of stress-related problems stemming from pressures at work. Not uncommonly, they may first see their primary care physician for one or more persistent physical complaints, such as palpitations, nervous stomach, headaches, and chronic insomnia, with the expectation that the doctor will diagnose the problem and treat it, fixing what is wrong with them. When the physician suggests that it is nothing serious, “just stress,” it is very easy to feel incensed and indignant.
One man, the plant manager of the largest high-tech manufacturing firm of its kind in the country, came to the clinic with complaints of dizzy spells at work and a feeling that his life was “spinning out of control.” When his doctor suggested that his symptoms were due to job stress, he wouldn’t believe it at first. Even though he had responsibility for the production efficiency of the entire plant, he denied feeling stressed. While there were certainly things that bothered him at work, they were “no big deal.” He suspected he might have a brain tumor or something “physical” causing his problems. He said, “I thought there had to be something wrong with me internally.… When you feel like you’re about to fall down on the job and you’re looking to grab something, you say, ‘Stress is one thing, but there has got to be something really wrong for this to happen.’ ” He felt so bad physically at work and was wound up so tight mentally by the time he left to go home at night that he would frequently have to pull his truck over to the side of the road to regain control of himself. He thought he was losing his mind. He also thought he was going to die from lack of sleep. He described himself as being up for days at a time. He would watch the news until 11:30 and then go to bed. He might sleep for one hour, perhaps from 2:00 to 3:00 a.m. Then he would be awake thinking about what the next day was going to bring. His wife recognized that he was under a lot of stress, but somehow he was unwilling to see it that way, perhaps because he just couldn’t believe that stress could make him feel so bad. It was also inconsistent with his role, and with his image of himself as a strong leader. When he was referred to the clinic, he had been having problems at work for about three years, and things were reaching a breaking point.
By the time the course ended, he was no longer having dizzy spells and he was sleeping soundly through the night. Things changed in about the fourth week, when he heard other people in his class describing the same things he was feeling and their success at regulating them and feeling more in control. He began to entertain the notion that perhaps he too could do something to regulate his own body and bring the symptoms he was having under greater control. He came to realize that, indeed, his symptoms really were directly related to stress at work. He began to see that he felt worse toward the end of the month, when the shipments had to go out, the profits had to be tallied, and the pressure was on. At those times, he would find himself running around like crazy getting his employees “cooking,” as he put it. But because he was practicing the meditation daily, he was now aware of what he was doing and feeling, and he found he could use awareness of his breathing to relax and break the automatic stress reaction cycle before it built up too much.
Looking back on it when the course was over, he felt that it was his attitude toward his work, more than anything else, that had changed. He attributed this to the fact that he was paying more attention to his body and to what was bothering him. He began to see himself and his mind and behavior in a new light, and realized that he didn’t have to take things so seriously. He would tell himself, “The most they can do is fire me. Let’s not worry about it. I’m doing the best I can. Let’s take it day by day.” He would use his breathing to keep himself calm and centered, to keep himself from reaching what he called “that point of no return.” When he recognizes that he is in a stressful situation, now he finds that he can immediately feel himself tensing up in the shoulders and say to himself, “Slow down, let’s gear it back a little.” As he explained to me, “I can back right off it now. I don’t even have to go sit down. I can just do it. I can be talking to someone and go right into a state of relaxation.”
His change in perspective is reflected in how he goes to work in the morning. He started taking back roads, driving more slowly, doing his breathing on the way in to work. By the time he gets there, he is ready for the day. He used to take the main roads through the city, as he put it, “fighting with people at the lights.” Now he can see and admit to himself that in the past he was actually a nervous wreck even before he reached work. He feels like a different person now, he says, ten years younger. His wife can’t believe it and neither can he.
He was shocked to think that things could have gotten as bad as they did, that he could have gotten into such an “unbelievable state of mind.” “I used to be the calmest person when I was a kid. Then gradually things at work crept up on me, especially as the money got bigger and bigger. I wish I had taken this program ten years ago.”
But it wasn’t just his attitude toward work and his awareness of his reactivity that changed. He took steps to communicate more effectively with his employees and made real changes in the way things were getting done. “After I was practicing the meditation for a few weeks, I came to the decision that it was time to start putting more trust into the people who work for me, that I just had to. I called a big meeting and said, ‘Look, you guys, you are getting paid a lot of money to do these jobs and I’m not carrying you anymore. This is what I expect, bang bang bang bang, and if it’s too much, we’ll get more people, but this is what has to be done and we’re all going to get it together and we are going to work as a team.’ And it’s working out all right. They don’t do it 100 percent the way you’d like, but it gets done anyway and you have to be willing to bend and live with that. That’s life, I guess. I am able to be much more efficient, and we are making big money.” So now he feels that he is more productive on the job even though he is experiencing far less stress. He had seen that he was wasting a lot of time doing things that other people should have been doing. “To be a manager of a plant, you have to be doing the right things to keep the ship floating and going in the right direction all the time. I find that although now I’m not working as hard, I get more done. Now I have time to sit at my desk and plan, whereas before I used to have fifty people always on my back, constantly coming to me with this or that.”
This is an example of how one person was able to bring the meditation practice into his work life. He came to see what was actually happening at work with greater clarity and, as a result, was able to reduce his stress and rid himself of his symptoms without having to quit his job. If we had told him at the beginning that this would have happened as a result of lying down and scanning his body for forty-five minutes a day for eight weeks or from following his breathing, he would have thought we were crazy, and with good reason. But because he was at his wits’ end, he made the commitment to do what his doctor and we were recommending in spite of its apparent “craziness.” As it was, it took four weeks for him to begin to see how the meditation practice was relevant to his situation. Once that connection was made, he was able to tap into his own inner resources. He was able to slow down and appreciate the richness of the present moment, listen to his body, and put his intelligence to work.
Few of us on the planet, regardless of the work we do, would not benefit from greater awareness. It is not just that we would be calmer and more relaxed. In all likelihood, if we saw work as an arena in which we could hone inner strength and wisdom moment by moment, we would make better decisions, communicate more effectively, be more efficient, and perhaps even leave work happier at the end of the day.
HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR REDUCING WORK STRESS
1. When you wake up, take a few quiet moments to affirm that you are choosing to go to work today. If you can, briefly review what you think you will be doing and remind yourself that it may or may not happen that way.
2. Bring awareness to the whole process of preparing to go to work. This might include showering, dressing, eating, and relating to the people you live with. Tune in to your breathing and your body from time to time.
3. When leaving the house, don’t say good-bye mechanically to people. Make eye contact with them, touch them; really be “in” those moments, slowing them down just a bit. If you leave before other people wake up, you might try writing them a brief note to say good morning and express your feelings toward them.
4. If you walk to public transportation, be aware of your body breathing, walking, standing and waiting, riding, and getting off. Walk into work mindfully. As best you can, leave your cell phone alone. Try smiling inwardly. If driving, take a moment or two to come to your breathing before you start the car. Remind yourself that you are about to drive off to work now. Some days, at least, try driving without the radio on. Just drive and be with yourself, moment by moment. Leave your cell phone alone. When you park, take a moment or two to just sit and breathe before you leave the car. Walk into work mindfully. Breathe. If your face is already tense and grim, try smiling, or try a half smile if that is too much.
5. At work, take a moment from time to time to monitor your bodily sensations. Is there tension in your shoulders, face, hands, or back? How are you sitting or standing in this moment? What is your body language saying? Consciously let go of any tension as best you can as you exhale and shift your posture to one that expresses balance, dignity, and alertness.
6. When you find yourself walking at work, take the edge off it. Walk mindfully. Don’t rush unless you have to. If you have to, know that you are rushing. Rush mindfully.
7. Try doing one thing at a time and giving it the full attention that it deserves for as long as it deserves, without distracting yourself or allowing yourself to be distracted, such as by incoming emails and texts. Overall, the evidence from studies shows that not only does multitasking not work, it degrades performance on every task you are trying to juggle.
8. Take frequent breaks if you can and use them to truly relax and renew. Instead of drinking coffee or smoking a cigarette, try going outside the building for three minutes and walking or standing and breathing. Or do neck and shoulder rolls at your desk (see Figure 7). Or shut your office door if you can and sit quietly for five minutes or so, following your breathing.
9. Spend your breaks and lunchtime with people you feel comfortable with. Otherwise, maybe it would be better for you to be alone. Changing your environment at lunch can be helpful. Choose to eat one or two lunches a week in silence, mindfully.
10. Alternatively, don’t eat lunch. Go out and exercise, every day if you can, or a few days a week. Exercise is a great way of reducing stress. Your ability to do this will depend on how much flexibility you have in your job. If you can do it, it is a wonderful way of clearing the mind, reducing your tension, and starting the afternoon refreshed and with a lot of energy. Many workplaces now have wellness centers that provide organized employee exercise programs both at lunchtime and before and after work. If you have the opportunity to exercise at work, take it! But remember, an exercise program takes the same kind of commitment that the formal meditation takes. And when you do it, do it mindfully. That changes everything.
11. Try to stop for one minute every hour and become aware of your breathing. We waste far more time than this daydreaming at work. Use these mini meditations to tune in to the present and just be. Use them as moments in which to regroup and recoup. All it takes is remembering to do it. This one is not easy, since we so easily get carried away by the momentum of all the doing.
12. Use everyday cues in your environment as reminders to center yourself and relax—the telephone ringing, downtime before a meeting convenes, waiting for someone to finish something before you can start in on it. Instead of relaxing by “spacing out,” relax by tuning in.
13. Be mindful of your communications with people during the workday. Are they satisfying? Are some problematic? Think about how you might improve them. Be aware of people who tend to relate to you in a passive or a hostile mode. Think about how you might approach them more effectively. Try seeing your fellow employees with eyes of wholeness. Think about how you might be more sensitive to their feelings and needs. How might you help others at work by being more mindful and more heartful? How might awareness of tone of voice and body language, your own and that of others, help you when communicating?
14. At the end of the day, review what you have accomplished and make a list of what needs to be done tomorrow. Prioritize the items on your list so that you know what is most important.
15. As you are leaving work, bring your awareness to walking and breathing again. Be aware of the transition we call “leaving work.” Monitor your body. Are you exhausted? Are you standing erect or bent over? What expression is on your face? Are you in the present moment, or are you getting out ahead of yourself in your thinking mind?
16. If you are taking public transportation, bring your attention to your breathing, walking, standing, and sitting. Notice if you are rushing. Can you back it down a bit and own those moments between work and home as much as any of your other moments to live? Be aware of the impulse to fill them up by being on your phone. As much as possible, be aware of the impulse to use it, and leave it alone to whatever degree possible. Just see if you can be in your own good company for at least some of this time. Or, if you are driving, take a moment or two once again to sit in your car before you start it up. Drive home mindfully. Leave the cell phone alone unless it is hands-free and essential that you make the call then and not later. Can you be aware of that decision? Can you be aware of the impulse to simply ignore your decision and make the call anyway?
17. Before you walk in the door, realize that you are about to do so. Be aware of this transition we call “coming home.” Try greeting people mindfully and making eye contact rather than shouting to announce your arrival.
18. As soon as you can, take your shoes off and get out of your work clothes. Changing to other clothes can complete the transition from work to home and allow you to integrate more quickly and consciously into your non-work roles. If you can make the time, take five minutes or so to meditate before you do anything else, even cooking or eating dinner.
19. Keep in mind that the real meditation is how you live your life from moment to moment. In this way, everything you do can become part of your meditation practice, if you are willing to inhabit the present moment and embrace it in awareness, in your body, “underneath” thinking.
The foregoing are offered merely as hints and suggestions for bringing your mindfulness practice into the domain of work. Ultimately, of course, the challenge is yours to decide what might best help you reduce any stress related to your work. Your creativity and imagination in this regard will be your most important resource.