9 Is Your Job Stress Perceived or Circumstantial?
by Brendan P. Keegan
Recently, I went out to dinner at a local restaurant. It was clear our server had too many tables and was struggling to keep up with all of them. Whether this was due to a labor shortage or one of his coworkers calling in sick, it occurred to me that, on this particular day, his job was more stressful than mine.
It made me grateful for the day of work I’d had (even though it had felt like a stressful one before I met our server), and it changed my perspective.
We all complain about job stress—according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, stress among the world’s workers reached an all-time high in 2021.1 And some jobs are legitimately stressful—think paramedics, ...
Get The HBR Work Smart Collection (4 Books) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
