Gütersloh, 10/26/2023

Mental Health Initiative: Managing Stress and Setting Boundaries

The third and final part of our BENET series on this year’s Bertelsmann initiative “Mental Health in Focus” focuses on stress management. For example, employees can take part in a live discussion with “New York Times” bestselling author Nedra Glover Tawwab (“Set Boundaries, Find Peace”) on November 28.

Following an online course collection for all employees and special offers for executives, this year’s Bertelsmann initiative “Mental Health in Focus” today focuses on dealing with stress in everyday work. As a highlight in connection with this topic, the Bertelsmann health management team has organized a live discussion with “New York Times” bestselling author Nedra Glover Tawwab (“Set Boundaries, Find Peace,” published by Penguin Random House US, TarcherPerigee) on November 28. In it, she will talk about setting and keeping boundaries at work, among other topics, and offer insight into her day-to-day work as a psychologist.

Health experts believe that consciously setting boundaries can significantly reduce stress levels in both private and professional life. For this to succeed, however, it is first necessary to understand how stress arises and how it can be recognized. The World Health Organization (WHO), e.g., defines stress as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives.” The basis for stress in the workplace are the various stressors that affect each person. These range from environmental influences (such as temperature fluctuations) to aspects of work organization and design (for example, break times and task distribution), to social relationships (such as the team climate). Each workplace is very individual and thus brings with it very different kinds of stressors that affect the employees who work there. And the way in which people handle these stressors also varies greatly. The decisive factors here are the intensity, frequency, and duration of the stressor, as well as the personal resources such as abilities and needs that an individual brings with them.

Positive and negative stress

If a person can cope well with the external pressures and demands acting on them using their own resources, they will feel positively challenged in their everyday work and hence will experience satisfaction and, in the long term, an increase in competence. So to a certain extent, a temporary high level of exposure to stressors can have a stimulating and activating effect, and thus sustain motivation. However, if the stressor acting on a person are too high, too frequently recurring, and/or long-lasting, and if the person cannot cope with them using their own resources, this leads to negative stress.

In the workplace, stress can have a significant impact on physical and mental health, as well as on job performance. Stress manifests itself in different responses in each person, which in turn can be perceived very differently. A selection of the most common symptoms can be found in the diagram accompanying this article. Short-term effects of stress are usually directly detectable, but the long-term negative consequences often don’t show up until later. Persistent high levels of stress over a longer period of several weeks or months can lead to a reduction in well-being and quality of life as well as to mental and physical illnesses of varying severity.

Strengthening inner resilience

Besides making initial small adjustments (such as adhering to daily routines, getting enough sleep, and ensuring a healthy diet) in everyday life, boosting one’s own inner resilience can have a particularly big impact on personal stress management. Resilience, also known as mental toughness, describes people’s ability to master crises by relying on resources, and then using these crises as an opportunity for their own further development. So resilient people are thus able to absorb high pressure using their own individual resources, and often actually emerge stronger from a crisis.