Setting extreme targets is a major cause of job-related stress and burnout.
I wonder why so much is posted about how to achieve your goals and so little about choosing them wisely? Many people seem to think that seeking perfection is a good way to achieve outstanding results. In fact, it’s usually the best way [...]

Do you need to be successful first to be happy, or does happiness produce success?
It�€™s an important question, because making happiness conditional on success is the usual path; and it doesn�€™t seem to be working for many people. They endure considerable amounts of unhappiness, often for many years, in the belief that when success comes [...]

Religious people have long used retreats—time totally away from the world and its distractions—as a way to deepen their understanding and refresh their spirits. Those are goals that can benefit anyone. You don’t need to be religious to use the idea yourself to ward off stress.
The religious retreat is a specific period completely away from [...]

One of the less-noticed problems with today’s cult of speed is that it promotes superficial thinking and mental laziness.
If you feel you have no time available, the temptation to cut mental corners and jump to some well-known, supposedly tested solution can be overwhelming; even if you feel, deep down, that it’s not really the right [...]

Study suggests managers may not know when employees are overwhelmed
�€œStress in most workplaces is nothing new.But a new survey done by ComPsych, a Chicago-based employee assistance company, suggests many bosses don�€™t notice when anxiety is running high among workers.While 60 percent of employees reported high levels of stress and extreme fatigue in a spring survey [...]

A balanced outlook on life is more important than you think.
Consider this: every strength can become a weakness; every talent contains elements that sometimes make it into a handicap. Today, we�€™re urged constantly to be winners and to achieve high standards. If being a winner is everything, what does that make losing feel like? Attitudes [...]

How to win back large parts of your day.
When people write about time management, they usually focus on impersonal matters: prioritization, organization, various forms of distraction and loss of focus. All sound topics, and all safely open to being dealt with by training or some teachable techniques. But when I look back on my own [...]

If you ever say, too late, �€œIt�€™s got me again,�€� this article is for you.
What do people and fish have in common? They�€™re both easily caught with baited hooks. In the human species, the bait doesn�€™t even need to be attractive or edible; just something that sparks an emotional reaction. One moment you�€™re sitting [...]

Many people find that they have reached a serious state of stress before they even notice that anything is happening. On the basis that prevention is better than cure, here�€™s an idea to help you stay aware of what is going on and take action well before anything unpleasant happens.
Stress, overwhelm, anxiety, obsession: all of [...]

Sometimes you can’t simply avoid stress or make it go away. How can you handle it when there’s no other alternative?
I often write on this web site about ways to avoid workplace stress or stop it happening in the first place. That’s obviously the best course of action, but this isn’t a world where you [...]