Stress Addiction

What do you know about stress addiction? You or your organization is addicted to stress? Let's be honest, some individuals and some organizations perform better under stressful conditions. Some organizations nurture a stressful culture as a means to continually pressure maximum performance with minimum manpower. Some other organizations leverage the energy associated with bursts of focused stress to overcome significant obstacles, and then minimize stress in between major hurdles to maintain a balanced workforce. How can you tell the difference?

Procrastination in dealing with important tasks is sometimes an indication of personal stress addiction. Some individuals acknowledge better performance under stressful situations. In some cases this helps to focus on a project. If this applies to you, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate your schedule, your personal goals, and your workload. By setting personal goals as commitments to complete projects or workload ahead of schedule, you can create your own deadlines and get ahead of the curve. Procrastination may be a sign that the workload is too light and you need to take on more responsibilities, or challenge yourself with more personal tasks. This will create an environment of balanced stress that you can manage by increasing or decreasing personal additional tasks to accommodate required or assigned workloads.

This does not mean that putting things off until the last minute is always a sign of stress addiction. If you continually put things off to the last minute, the result for your product or project will be in a bad quality. However if your projects or product are equivalent that would have been achieved earlier, then you are just being lazy and you need a stress inducing boss to get you moving. Last minute's work is a bad habit that will make you a clumsy person.

On the other hand, if items are continually addressed at the last minute simply because you have too many other priorities that take precedence and it is virtually impossible to catch up, then you have an unhealthy stressful environment and it is time to evaluate the conditions.

Have you ever experienced an organization that continually threatens potential layoffs, cancellation of contracts, or incessantly proclaims gloom and doom of current conditions? While organizations may perform better under short bursts of highly focused stressful conditions, it is not something that can be sustained effectively for long periods of time. Individuals within the organization will react differently to stressful conditions and will burn out at varying periods of time. After a period of high intensity it is necessary to allow a period for cooling down, refreshing and reenergizing the troops.