Is Your Job Stressing You Out? Turns Out Most Pinoys Are

Feeling burnt out at work?

You’re not alone. Turns out most Filipinos are.

CNN Philippines recently conducted a survey on the top things that cause stress to most Filipinos. The top answer? Work or studies. CNN Philippines reports that roughly 23% of their respondents cited that their current occupation have been causing them stress, adding specific causes such as immediate superiors and poor management, a heavy workload, lagging behind schedule, and colleagues.

Being stuck in heavy traffic came in second, with 15% of the respondents citing it as source of stress. Financial problems came in at a close third.

Stress may be a constant fixture in our lives, but that doesn’t we have to feel helpless toward it. Here are some things that will help you better deal with stress:

1. Step back and take a quick breather.

Take a quick five-minute break to clear your head when you’re feeling stressed out, just so you have time to recoup. Take breathing exercises to release the stress, treat yourself to your favorite snack, or tune out the world with your favorite song. You’d be surprised just how much you could do when you’re more relaxed.

2. Identify things that are within your control.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you have daunting tasks, crazy deadlines, crazier colleagues, and a scary boss. But the thing is, these are problems that are out of your control. You can’t force your colleagues or boss to act a certain way and you can’t demand to have more lenient deadlines, but how you react to them is an entirely different matter. Isolate things that you can do something about (e.g., like how you manage your time) and focus on them instead of the ones that you can’t (e.g., a tight deadline).

3. Divide your problems into manageable tasks.

So you were given a very challenging project at work. You only have a couple of hours to draft a proposal to your manager, and you are understandably freaking out. But instead of looking at your deliverable as a huge proposal, why don’t you try breaking it up into smaller and manageable tasks instead? For example, you can list down problems that you proposal would like to address as one task, and coming up with solutions to the said problems as another. Doing so will make your problems seem less daunting.