Stress Is (Still) Rising Globally. Here Are 3 Evidence-Based Solutions to Navigate the Storm

March 2024

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The epidemic of stress has real consequences for employees and businesses alike. How bad is it and what can we do to reduce stress, both short-term and long-term?

1. Stress at work at all-time high

Stress has been rising for the past decade, per research from Gallup.

Globally, 44% of employees reported feeling stressed A LOT of the day yesterday – maintaining a record high set in 2021. It’s been a slow, steady, 15-year march of rising stress. Check out this graph:

A closer look at the data, from Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce 2023 Report, reveals some interesting trends:

• More younger workers experience stress than older workers, which supports the evidence of young people’s experiences at work revealed in the State of the Heart
• More women experience stress (46%) than men (42%)
• How workers feel about their jobs matters a lot more in reducing stress than where they do their job – Employee engagement has 3.8 times as much influence on employee stress as work location
• The only exception to the negative correlation between engagement and stress? Women, who report higher levels of engagement than men but also higher levels of stress. This also supports our finding in State of the Heart that women are leading the post-COVID comeback, but still carrying an unsustainable burden.

But for all workers, stress remains dangerously high. How can we best support employees to navigate stress and uncertainty? Here are 3 solutions based on the neuroscience of stress – two very tangible, and the other much less so (but in my personal experience, even more powerful).

2. Make space between meetings

Let’s start with the tangible, easy way to limit stress: Schedule short breaks between meetings. Microsoft’s Work Trends Index just released a fascinating study that tracked people’s brain waves as they attended multiple hours of meetings – with and without breaks.

What did they find? Back-to-back meetings are stressful, and so is transitioning between them. 

Participants took part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment—a cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains. All attended 30-minute meetings devoted to different tasks – half with no breaks scheduled between meetings and half with 10-minute breaks, during which they meditated on the Headspace app. The next week, the two groups switched. The researchers found that during two hours of back-to-back meetings, the brain waves associated with stress increased and accumulated with time. Check out this graph of people’s brains: break vs. no break, from Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab:

Interestingly, researchers also noticed that the transition period between calls caused beta activity, or stress levels, to spike. Except for the group who took breaks, who had a chance to “reset” – not only preventing a spike but causing a dip in stress-related brain activity.

A clear path forward to reduce stress is to schedule breaks between meetings.

3. Remember to connect

Did you know that part of the body’s stress response is for the pituitary gland to release oxytocin, the love and trust chemical? If that sounds like the opposite of stress, that’s exactly the point. Releasing the hormone oxytocin is your body’s way of telling you to connect and seek support – the ultimate antidote to stress. “The production of oxytocin drives you to seek support in times of stress,” says Kelly McGonigal, author of The Upside of Stress. “To tell someone how you feel and to be surrounded by people who care about you.”

So next time you’re stressed, remember: That’s a message from your body that you need to mobilize your social support network.

One study from the University of Buffalo stands out as a remarkable testament to this stress-social support connection. It found stressed people suffering major life disruptors (financial, relationship, medical, career) had an increased likelihood of death of 30%. but stressed people who helped and were connected to others had a 0% increase in likelihood of death.

That’s because as we’ll see, how we think about stress matters a lot in terms of its ultimate impact on our brains and bodies.

4. Make space between meetings

Stress is all in our heads – in a very real, measurable, and almost disturbing way.

That’s the key finding of research highlighted in The Upside of Stress. “When you change your mind about stress,” McGonigal says, “you can change your body’s response to it.”

What’s the key differentiator in how we think about stress? Whether we see it as a challenge or a threat.

In both cases, stress is a physical and emotional signal. Stress means we care about something and it’s at risk. It’s not inherently good or bad; it’s data. And it’s data based on what we perceive around us. But the key difference is whether we think we have sufficient resources or support to deal with it. Challenge feelings happen when you feel you have enough resources to cope with the situation. But when you feel the situation is too demanding, exceeding your resources, you experience it as a threat. A stress challenge energizes you; makes you more efficient, productive, and literally improves cardiovascular function. A stress threat slowly kills you, inhibiting you in all sorts of ways and leading to decreased cardiovascular function, heart attacks, and all the other negative health outcomes associated with stress. The difference, often, is simply how we think about what we’re facing.

Remember: you have a choice about how you perceive and react to stress.

So if you need to reduce stress in your life or with the people you manage at work, experiment with these 3 solutions:
– Schedule breaks between meetings
– Take time to connect
– Change how you think about stress

I hope you find this information and practical tips useful.