Modifying procrastination

  Both failure avoidant and success avoidant individuals may also engage in the maladaptive coping strategy of ‘procrastination’. This form of avoidance essentially involves ‘putting off until tomorrow what one should do today’. Procrastinators repeatedly avoid the timely initiation and completion of assignments that need to be completed by a certain deadline. This often results in a surge of last minute effort, considerable anxiety and a lower quality of work due to the task being rushed.

As with underachievers, individuals who procrastinate need to consider alternative ways of thinking such as ‘Don’t put things off’ and ‘Do it now’. Procrastinators should be encouraged to stop putting things off and do them as soon as is practically possible, plan ahead, do tasks in manageable chunks and aim to meet deadlines set. The outcomes of such behavioural experiments should serve to disconfirm and weaken their dysfunctional beliefs by demonstrating that their worst negative fears and predictions do not materialize.

Summary

  This chapter has introduced you to a range of cognitive tools and techniques for identifying, labelling and challenging unhelpful patterns of thinking associated with stress. The importance of conducting behavioural experiments has also been emphasized. Finally, some strategies for improving your relationship with your work have also been discussed. You are encouraged to make use of all these tools to identify your own unhelpful thinking patterns and to challenge and change them to more healthy, rational and adaptive ones.

Chapter 10 Overcoming stress syndromes

Introduction

  While the primary and secondary level interventions outlined earlier in this book have been demonstrated to be effective in tackling mild to moderate levels of stress, they may not be effective in alleviating the more severe and disabling levels of stress, which are associated with stress syndromes. These can impact on the individual’s capacity to carry out their work effectively and ultimately to even remain at work. Where this is the case, more formal tertiary level interventions are required to help the individual overcome the stress they are experiencing. These are typically accessed through the family doctor and delivered by mental health specialists, such as counsellors or psychologists. However, there are a number of practical self-help tools and techniques which can be employed before seeking specialist professional help. Three main stress syndromes have been identified, namely the anxiety or fear syndrome, the depression syndrome and the hostility syndrome. This chapter outlines a range of self-help interventions for treating each of these. These interventions are mainly cognitive behavioural in approach, since research has demonstrated that the evidence base for the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy in treating stress syndromes is strong.

Treating anxiety syndromes

  Anxiety syndromes are characterized by chronic feelings of fear and the desire to flee, escape and avoid perceived dangers and threats. Anxiety is a general term for a range of anxiety disorders, which include ‘situation specific’ anxiety disorders, panic attacks and phobias. In the work context, situation specific anxiety most commonly revolves around the employee’s performance on given tasks in a particular work setting and has this been given the term ‘performance anxiety’. The presentation and treatment of each of these manifestations of the anxiety syndrome are outlined below.