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In order to understand stress and how to manage stress, you need to know how people respond. Specifically, people need to know how to overcome negative self talk. To make this practical, I will describe how Jane operates in the workplace.

What has happened to 42-year-old Jane? No previous stress attacks or mental-health problems. But she came to me because she was very stressed at work. She felt she was being criticised all the time and that her colleagues did not respect her productivity. She became socially phobic. He has difficulty going out with her husband. She hides away from people when she goes to parties.

Jane is experiencing work stress and this is a major problem. Everything seems to be too much of a burden for her. She is having physical reactions of nausea and illness. Her work demands are too much for her and she can’t cope and she feels depressed and anxious all the time.

Jane is not performing well at work. She can’t manage the stress and her system is overloaded. You feel the same way sometimes too? Can you understand her level of stress? Have life’s events overtaken you? Are you constantly tired and mildly depressed? Do people ask what is wrong with you? Are you tired of life? Are you coping well? Has all of this made it much less effective at work?

If you believe that this fits you, you are having problems with stress at work. We seem to be working longer and being stress more. Some people think this is acceptable. Reported cardiac illnesses increased after the 9/11 attack. High blood pressure, strokes and related disorders increased. With emotional trauma comes physical ailments. When people are unwell emotionally they don’t function well at work.

What are these workplace stressors? That is, what are the events that elevate stress? They include a long list of things.

These include excessive workplace demands. Poor management and poor communication in the workplace cause stress. Oddly enough, poor relationships at home can cause workplace stress as much as interpersonal conflict with colleagues.

What is the best way to cope in the workplace? In large measure its up to you. You can change jobs but this is not very effective. One clever way to solve the problem of your boss is to list his or her name with a headhunter in the hope that someone else will employ your boss. From my experience the major problem with stress at work is poor role specification. Different perspectives on your work responsibilities will cause stress. The question remains how to solve this problem appropriately.

But what does this mean? Here’s the first message – YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK. You are your own pilot navigating your way through your own life. YOU are responsible for yourself. YOU can make the changes in your life if you want. If you are in a stressful situation, you CAN deal with the stress and the situation. The first principle is to know yourself and the nature of your self-talk. Most of how we feel is determined by what we think. We spend a very large amount of our day filling our head with self-talk – little conversations we have with ourselves.

I know this sounds simple but it is true. We constantly run ourselves down and criticize ourselves. We have probably 10 times more negative and dysfunctional ’self-thoughts’ than we have positive self-thoughts. More than anything I can think of, this tendency to be continually self-critical causes the greatest tension. And guess what, if we have friends, family, loved ones who also criticize us unrelentingly, we are really in trouble. The challenge is simple – if we want to improve our lives we have to change our thinking.