All jobs are stressful - and all stress is relative - but certain roles place higher demands on people than others.
"Well, nobody died" is a platitude we often hear after a manic day at the office. Yet some employees face exactly that risk.
In this widely-shared post on Reddit, an unnamed staff sergeant with the US Air Force shared a fascinating piece of advice he picked up from a fighter pilot colleague.
This is someone who faces life or death decisions in the course of his daily job. And his approach to coping with stress is both simple and nothing short of revolutionary.
We've called it the building block method.
With workplace stress at an all-time high in the UK, we take a look at the three golden rules of this genius approach - as laid out in the Reddit tutorial.
1. Think of stress as a physical block, not an emotion
The problem with stress, the pilot says, is that we tend to treat it as an emotion that we can resolve with activities that make us feel better - like yoga, or a workout.
These are good for temporary relief but not a solution in or of themselves.
Instead, we should view stress as a physical condition that affects our body by increasing our blood pressure, and impacting our ability to eat and sleep.
And this physical stress is created by blocks that build up in our lives.
"This is how stress stacks up on your life: Imagine a graph," he explains. "There is an invisible line somewhere on it going straight, horizontally, all the way across. That is your personal 'stress threshold'. Literally everything that you have to do in your life is a stressor. Imagine them as blocks stacking up on top of each other. Some are bigger than others. The closer you get to your threshold, the more stressed you feel.
"If you do not prevent them from crossing that threshold, you will enter depression, which is your body saying, 'screw it, you won't fix it, I'll just shut everything down until it works itself out.'"
2. Make a list of everything that stresses you out
To stop your stress blocks from building up, the pilot advises that we should write down a list.
This should include absolutely everything that stresses us out on a daily basis, from the weighty to the mundane. Anything that makes you think, "Oh crap, I have to do that" would count as a stressor, whether that's feeding the cat, tackling the tube commute or preparing for a work presentation.
Then take a look at your list and see what you can knock off it, right there and then.
By doing this, you will be taking active steps to blitz your stress blocks in real time, and literally removing stress from your life - rather than just changing the way you feel about it.
By tackling the small, reoccuring stresses in your daily life, you'll be better equipped to combat bigger challenges. And you'll turn anxiety into productivity in the process.
"I've been doing this for years now and it works GREAT," the poster says. "It's how these fighter pilots manage their personal lives and flying a stupid fast war machine in combat. There have been a few times where I did still get too stressed out, but it was because I literally just had too much on my plate that was beyond my control, but since I understood how stress works, I was able to still get ahold of it and break myself out of the slight depression I had slipped into."
3. Identify and remove the stress blocks
Once you've tried this method once, you will quickly get into the hang of it - and it can be used time and again to manage everyday stress.
Just remember to carry on identifying the individual blocks that stack up and make you stressed, then work to get rid them one by one.
"Think of stress as psychical blocks stacking up on your life," the pilot says. "They key to keeping stress levels down is to REMOVE the blocks. Make a list of stress blocks, and ELIMINATE THEM. It will not just make you FEEL better, it will make you better."
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