health
psychology
When this happens to you at work, your stress level jumps
We have so many things on our minds that the last thing we need is for someone to interrupt us or interrupt us in the middle of a task at work - but sometimes it is precisely this niggles that can cause a very interesting phenomenon.
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Stress
pressure
Walla!
health
Tuesday, 10 November 2020, 12:31
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Disorders and social pressure are the two leading stressors in the workplace.
Illustration of a stressed person in the office (illustration: shutterstock)
No one likes to be disturbed in the middle of work or when he is busy, especially if he is in the middle of an important task.
But what happens under our skin while various factors interfere with us and interrupt our concentration while we are at work?
This is exactly what researchers from Switzerland wanted to test and their findings are very interesting, and not necessarily predictable.
"The first step in our study was to understand how to measure the effects of disorders and social stress - the two most common causes of stress in the workplace," said Jasmine Kerr, a psychologist at the Zurich Institute of Technology and who led the study.
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To the full article
For the benefit of the study, Kerr and her colleagues recruited 90 volunteers for an experiment in which the research lab became an office space, with rows of desktops and computers that simulated a work environment just like in real life.
Participants were asked to pretend to work for an insurance company and perform a variety of office tasks to the best of their ability, including: digital processing of scans, calculation of sales data and scheduling appointments.
The lab was designed like an office and the participants in the experiment were asked to perform office tasks while dealing with various disorders (illustration: shutterstock)
While they were engaged in performing these tasks, two actors entered the room pretending to be representatives of the Human Resources Department and causing participants to respond to additional work scenarios.
Some of the participants (the control group) were asked to collaborate with one relatively simple scenario in front of "Human Resources".
Whereas the other participants (divided into two groups of stressful conditions) were presented with scenarios that included psychosocial stress, they underwent an interview and evaluation and were in fact asked to undergo a sort of job interview for promotion.
And all this while they still have to try to perform the rest of their chores in the office.
In both groups of stress conditions, participants were asked to prepare for a job interview and then pass one, but for participants in the first stress group the researchers interfered only with simple questionnaires and taking saliva samples.
Whereas participants from the second pressure group were constantly interrupted with a series of messages in the office chat asking them to respond immediately and provide information and summaries regarding various aspects of their work.
Throughout the experiment, the researchers monitored the participants' stress levels in three ways: every 15-20 minutes they filled out questionnaires about their feelings, saliva samples were taken from them and also their pulse was continuously monitored by an ECG device.
The pulse rate increased, cortisol secretion increased.
Hand Squeezing Ball (Illustration: shutterstock)
The results showed that in relation to the control group, in both pressure groups an increase in pulse rate was observed and in the saliva samples of their participants higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol were measured.
However, there was also a notable difference between the two pressure groups - "Participants in the second pressure group (those who in addition also harassed them in the chat) had cortisol levels almost twice as high as those of the participants in the first pressure group," said one researcher, Mara Niglin of the Zurich Institute of Technology. .
These results are not very surprising given all the niches that these participants had to deal with in the experiment, but there was also a finding that nevertheless surprised the researchers, and it actually came up from the questionnaire that the participants of the pressure group 2 answered.
Interfering or helping?
"The interesting finding was that participants in the group that experienced workforce disturbances and interruptions did have higher cortisol levels, but in the questionnaires they rated the stress they experienced as less threatening than participants in the second group who experienced only psychosocial stress," the researchers wrote.
In other words, the participants in group 2, who seem to have the most difficulty with the researchers in the experiment, actually reported more positive feelings at the end and felt less threatened and stressed than the participants in group 1. Why is this so?
It is not clear, but the researchers speculate that the higher cortisol levels secreted in members of group 2 caused them to respond better, both emotionally and cognitively, to the stress they experienced.
Precisely the contestants who experienced more disorders and secreted more cortisol processed the stress better.
Stressed and tired woman in the office (illustration: shutterstock)
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"Another explanation may be that the chat messages served as a kind of distraction from the stress ahead of the job interview that the participants in the experiment were supposed to go through," they wrote.
So researchers actually think that disruptions and distractions while at work can have a positive effect, at least in terms of relieving stress, because they have the power to distract employees from other factors that negatively affect their mood.
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