Reducing Stress in the Workplace

NLP Techniques are highly effective at reducing stress in the workplace, as this article explains

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Reducing Stress in the Workplace

NLP Techniques are highly effective at reducing stress in the workplace.

There are different forms of stress.

Good Stress or Eustress is the excitement experienced when competing for a promotion or working towards target dates. This is the stress keeps us feeling alive and excited about life.

Acute Stress triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response by sending out signals to release stress hormones that prepare your body to fight or run away. This response is triggered by emotions like fear, anxiety, aggression, and anger. We can tolerate acute stress as long as we find ways to relax and quickly return our body to homeostasis, or its pre-stress state.

Chronic Stress happens when we repeatedly face stressors, we feel are inescapable for example a stressful job or an unhappy home life.  Because our bodies aren't designed for chronic stress, this can cause negative health effects (both physical and emotional) if experienced over an extended period of time.

Both Acute and Chronic stress reduce our ability to concentrate, focus, think clearly, solve problems, set and achieve goals, make good decision and control our emotions. All key requirements for working effectively in business.

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) has a wide range of tools and techniques to quickly deal with both Acute and Chronic Stress by giving you choices about how you think of a situation.

One of the principles of NLP is that all behaviour has a strategy, and that behaviour strategy or structure can be modelled. These behaviour strategies are made up of what you see, hear and touch in the ‘outside world’ and what you see, say to yourself and feel in the ‘inside word’

When you alter the way, you do something, the outcome will change

For example one of the quickest ways of changing a behavioural strategy, is by changing what you say to yourself.

People who are stressed about managing time, usually have one thing in common, they are saying to themselves “I have no time”.

Our brains are compelled to respond to what we tell ourselves, so if you have a report to finish in an hour and are telling yourself “I have no time to finish this report” see what happens when you change your self-talk to “I have all the time in the world within the next hour to finish this report”

Just changing what you say to yourself in this way, calms the nervous system, enabling you to focus on getting the report done.

Another technique is you can learn, is to reframe a situation to give yourself or someone else a different perspective.

For example notice what happens when someone says to you “I can’t do this” and you respond with “can’t do it yet” Or someone that is getting stressed over learning something new saying, “this is really difficult” and you say, “this is just new and you have learned to do many new things in the past, haven’t you?”

These are just a couple of the many NLP tools that we use.

The power of using NLP skills for reducing stress in business, is that they help you purposefully craft your language, in ways that quickly takes someone from an unresourceful stressed state, to feeling calm and motivated, just by having a conversation with them.

Using NLP techniques to calm Acute Stress on a daily basis helps to stop people developing Chronic stress which can result in time off sick and people leaving their job.

Fiona Campbell
Fiona Campbell (member article)

International ANLP Accredited Trainer, NLP Coach Trainer, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Professional Growth Coach and Corporate Facilitator specialising in NLP Business training for leaders and coaches.