I notice of all the articles I am writing on stress that those most frequently read are about workplace stress. Clearly, for many of us, work IS life, but work does not make life work, if you'll forgive the play on words. Most therapists, including me, review a constellation of factors when identifying either personal or workplace stress. These include family concerns, finances, addictive behaviors, relationships, and work. We know that many people that we see have failed to develop and maintain a healthy and nurturing life-work balance.

So what is there about work, stress, and life-balance disorders that provide too much tension and too little stress relief? I could provide more than 20 factors in the workplace that can create organizational and personal malaise.

But, in this article, I do not want to list the obvious workplace stressors. Instead, let me tell you the very WORST workplace stressor - it is what YOU tell YOURSELF. Self-talk, the conversations we have with ourselves in our head, is what turns a workplace event into a persistent anxiety or stress. We have hundreds of these internal conversations per day, and guess what - most of them are negative and unproductive.

Negative self talk is extremely dysfunctional. Through our self-talk we convince ourselves that we are incompetent, unattractive, ineffectual, and so many other NOT-GOOD words. A simple event like a sharp or a thoughtless comment from a colleague can lead to critical self-talk, elevated self-criticisms, and a negative mood. The negative mood could be internalized (sad, anxious, worried, fearful, feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and so on) or externalized (anger, resentment, sharp retorts, criticism, socialized aggression in the form of gossip).

So how do we reduce and relieve stress? How do we stop burnout? How do we halt increasingly low morale? We convert negative thoughts into positive energy and actions. We block these negative thoughts. We replace them with positive and healthy thoughts. Sound simple doesn't it?

We can respond to workplace stress by refusing to engage in negative talk and self-blame. We can interrupt the downward spiral of the self-criticism IF WE WANT TO! Positive thought diminishes negative energy and provides stress reduction and stress relief. But more of that in my next article on workplace stress.