Tag: stress

Fear of fear

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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself- Franklin D. Roosevelt 

The Root of Fear and what it is? 

Let us first look at what is fear? If we can understand the problem with desire then we will understand and be free from fear. ‘I want to be something’ – that is the root of fear itself. When I want to be something, my desire to be something and my not being that something creates fear, not only in a narrow sense but in the widest sense possible. So as long as there is the desire to be something there must be fear.   

Observing this root of fear 

Can the mind possibly observe fear? Your fear: fear of death, fear of life, fear of loneliness, fear of darkness, fear of being a nobody, fear of been hurt, fear of been deceived, fear of not becoming a great success, fear of not being a leader,  fear of so many different things. First of all, is one aware of it? Or one tends to lead such a superficial life, only talking about something else and so one is never aware of oneself, of one’s own fears.   

Then if one does become aware of those fears, at what level do you become aware? Is it an intellectual awareness of them or are you actually aware of your fears at a degree of deeper level that is in the hidden recesses of the mind? And if they are so hidden, how are they to be exposed? Must you go to an analyst? But the analyst is you; he needs to be analysed too! 

So how do you uncover the whole structure and deal with the intricacies of fear? This is a tremendous problem, not just to be listened to for two or three minutes and then forgotten but to find out for oneself whether it is possible to expose all fears, or whether there is only one central fear that has many branches.  

When one sees the central fear the branches begin to wither away. If the mind can understand the root of fear then the branches, the various aspects of fear has no meaning, they wither away. So what is the root of fear? Can you look at your fear? Please look at it now, invite it. Naturally you are not afraid now, sitting here, but you know what your fears are: loneliness, not being loved, not being beautiful, frightened of losing your job, etc. 

By looking at one fear, at your particular fear, you can then see the root of that fear is the root of all fear. You will observe and see for yourself that through one fear you discover the very root of all fear. 

There is no illusion greater than fear- Lao Tzu 

So can you observe your fear like a tough nut? Through one fear trace the very root of all fear? Let us understand that ‘The self’ is the root of all fear. To inhibit or suppress fear is not to transcend or surpass it; its cause must be self-discovered then understood and finally dissolved. To understand consciousness, one has to be really free, totally, of fear. It is only with direct contact with fear that you are free. 

Fear has two meanings: ‘Forget everything and run Or Face everything and rise’ 

We have to understand fear and be completely free of it, right through your being that is the goal. Paradoxically, you can only do it when there is no escape of any kind. When you understand this, you are directly in contact with fear. In that contact there is no time interval, there is no saying, ‘I will get over it,’ or ‘I will develop courage,’ when you are frightened. We are dealing with facts here, and we cannot deal with what is if there is any form of escape, conscious or even unconscious. 

When you come directly into contact with fear, there is a response of the nerves. When the mind is no longer escaping through words or through activity of any kind, there is no division between the observer and the thing observed as fear. It is the mind that is escaping that separates itself from fear. But when there is a direct contact with fear there is no observer, there is no entity that says, ‘I am afraid.’ So, the moment you are directly in contact with life, with anything, there is no division and it is this division that breeds competition, ambition and fear. 

If you seek a way or a method or a system to be rid of fear, you will everlastingly be caught in fear. But if you understand fear, which can only take place when you come directly in contact with it then you do something. Only then will you find that all fear ceases – we mean all fear, not fear of this kind or of that kind in particular. Because out of the freedom and the understanding and the learning about fear comes intelligence, and intelligence is the essence of freedom. And there is no intelligence if there is any form of conflict, and conflict must exist as long as there is fear. 

Conditioning is the very root of fear, and where there is fear there is no virtue. To go into this profoundly requires a great deal of intelligence, and we mean by intelligence the understanding of all influence and being free of it. 

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown- H.P. Lovecraft 

The Physical and Emotional Effects of Fear 

Without fear, an individual’s chances of day-to-day survival would likely diminish. In this way, fear can be healthy; it helps people keep away from dangerous or harmful situations by triggering a “fight or flight” response. Fear often affects people physically and emotionally. 

Fear may cause someone to experience an enhanced perception of space and time, or their senses of sight, hearing, and smell may be heightened. In life-threatening situations, fear can also reduce the ability to notice fine detail while increasing the capacity to distinguish large or blurry objects. These adjustments in perception can increase a person’s chance of survival in a dangerous or savage situation. 

You may experience a variety of physical responses when experiencing fear, such as: 

  • Temporary paralysis or an erratic heartbeat 
  • Stomach pain, head pain, or nausea 
  • Dizziness or fainting 
  • Sweating 
  • Muscle tension, twitching, or trembling 
  • Crying 
  • Stuttering 
  • Erratic sleep patterns 
  • Loss of appetite 
  • Rapid or shallow breathing 

Psychological effects of fear can include intrusive or distracting thoughts, loss of focus, and confusion. People may also experience a variety of emotional effects, including terror, anxiety, anger, despair, numbness, or helplessness. 

Here are 12 ways to try and overcome fear:  

  • Understand fear and then embrace it   Embrace fear as instruction and let it inform your actions, but not control them. 
  •  Don’t just do something, sometimes just stand there!  When fear strikes consider whether the correct action might be to analyze the options and make a wise, well thought out choice rather than jumping to what seems right in the heat of the moment. 
  •  Name the fear and focus Sometimes merely stating what your fear is gives you the strength to deal with it. Say your fear out loud, write it down, or focus your mind on it. When you try to ignore your fear, it grows. When you face it, it shrinks. 
  •  Think and consider long term   If you’re an entrepreneur, you may be afraid you won’t make the next payroll. But what’s your three month outlook, or the outlook for three years from now? Thinking about the long term won’t fix your short term problem, but it can help you think about it more objectively and come up with the right solution. 
  • Educate yourself to the core We are afraid of nothing so much as the unknown. If your fear is based on a lack of information, then get the information or knowledge you need to examine the situation based on facts rather than mere speculation. 
  •  Prepare, practice, role play and repeat If your fear is related to your performance in a certain activity then prepare, practice, and role play and repeat the same till you hit perfection.  
  •  Utilize peer pressure for your good Peer pressure, like fear, can be positive or negative depending on how it’s displayed. Surround yourself with people who will push you to overcome the fears that are holding you back from what you want. 
  • Visualize success for greatness Athletes may imagine the successful completion of a physical task thousands of times before achieving it. This mental mapping ensures that when the body moves, it’s more likely to follow its pre-decided path. 
  • Gain a sense of proportion first How big of a deal, really, is the thing you are afraid of? We sometimes get so caught up in the success or failure of a particular quest that we lose sense of where it fits in or not with everything else we value.  
  • Get help if need be Whatever you’re afraid of, is it something you have to do alone? Can you find a mentor or support group to help you through it?  
  • Have a positive attitude for your own good Would you keep working long after others would have given up? People who have positive attitudes are successful because they keep trying after others give up. 
  •  Be willing to turn on pivot If you’re afraid to do something again because it didn’t work out the last time, figure out why it didn’t work, and try something different before you give up trying altogether. 

 

Fears are nothing more than a state of mind- Napoleon Hill 

 

Author: Trishna Patnaik

Trishna Patnaik

 

 

 

 

 

About the writer: 

 

Trishna Patnaik, a Bsc (in Life Sciences) and MBA (in Marketing) by qualification but an artist by choice. A self-taught artist based in Mumbai, Trishna has been practising art for over 14 years now. After she had a professional stint in various reputed corporates, she realised that she wanted to do something more meaningful. She found her true calling in her passion, that is painting. Trishna is now a full-time professional painter pursuing her passion to create and explore to the fullest. She says, “It’s a road less travelled but a journey that I look forward to everyday.” Trishna also conducts painting workshops across Mumbai and other metropolitan cities of India. Trishna is an art therapist and healer too. She works with clients on a one on one basis in Mumbai.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Featured image:

Photo by Tim Trad on Unsplash

open plan office

The psychological impact of open plan offices

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The design of an office has a measurable impact on employees’ wellbeing. The psychological impact of open plan offices is frequently overlooked by managers of companies. Of course for every situation, there are pros and cons but from the available reserach it would seem there are very few advantages when it comes to open plan offices.

In 1997, a Canadian company asked a group of psychologists from the University of Calgary to monitor employees as they shifted from a traditional office layout to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward, measuring their satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships. The results were less than positive; the employees suffered pursuant to every benchmark: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome. Instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity plummeted.

The advantages of an open plan office

Improves mobility. This is the only advantage I have found whilst doing my research.

The disadvantages of an open plan office

Dimishes collaboration – employees tend to send more emails.

Decreases interactions between employees.

A study found that employees working in small numbers (3 to 9 people) and medium-sized (10 to 20 people) in open-plan offices reported lower levels of well-being and ease of interaction with other employees.

“The open plan offices may have short-term financial benefits, but these benefits may be substantially lower than the costs associated with decreased job satisfaction and well-being,” Dr Otterbring further commented.

More interruptions and distractions leads to less focus on work.

Noise levels.

No privacy.

Hot desking – leads to a sense of being unimportant and undervalued, a cog in the wheel. Studies have shown that people forced to share workspaces reported feeling marginalised, experienced more distractions, negative relationships and uncooperative behaviour, not to mention feeling like their supervisors were being less supportive.

No escape from a bad boss. According to a recent Gallup poll of a million U.S. workers, a bad boss is the No. 1 reason people leave their jobs. According to the British Psychological Society, bad bosses can make employees chronically depressed and actively hostile to co-workers.

Employees are more likely to get ill – spread of communicable diseases increases. This increases absenteeism and lowers productivity amd company profits.

Approx 50% of the population (the percentage of introverts) find open office plans anxiety provoking and draining, thereby reducing productivity.

Open plan offices can increase gender inequality. Open plan offices favour more attractive females. and also promote sexual harrassment. Female employees often feel more exposed and ‘on show’ in open plan offices.

Evolution would suggest we all naturally feel safer with our back to a wall. This isn’t always possible in an open plan office and can lead someone to contantly experience low threat-anxiety. The triggering of stress hormones and the automatic: fight, flight, freeze response may be generated consistently whilst in an open plan office. There is a perceived lack of safety in this environment. When you sit with your back exposed, your body constantly produces the stress hormone cortisol, which negatively affects your weight and immune system while creating a greater risk of chronic disease.

Constant multi tasking is exhausting for the brain. Always being aware of surroundings, noise can be fatiguing on a long term basis. Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) is involved in the body’s “fight or flight” response. Essentially, workers in open offices are under a constant barrage of adrenaline, their bodies telling them to fight or flee. For those who suffer from anxiety disorders, high levels of epinephrine causes increased discomfort, worry, and distress. Over a period of time, the constant high dose of epinephrine leads to a phase of exhaustion where the body starts to experience the more harmful effects of anxiety.

 According to studies recently cited in Psychology Today: “People who were frequent media multitaskers had reductions in their brains’ grey matter–specifically, in areas related to cognitive control and the regulation of motivation and emotion…and exhibited weakness in both working memory (the ability to store relevant information while working on a task) and long-term memory (the ability to store and recall information over longer periods of time).”

 

The future will be different. Gadgets are more portable now and we don’t need an office anymore to do work. Public transport seems to be struggling to keep up with demand and the roads seem to be getting busier – remote office working seems to be the trend of the future.

Reasons to avoid an open plan office:

Many employers are caught up in the incorrect notion that open offices incite creativity and teamwork, and shaking them of it may be a difficult task. Open plan offices do more damage than good. Just ask your employees what they might prefer and work from there. Happy employees leads to more productive businesses with higher profits in the long term. Why do you think the big bosses always have their own offices?

 

Stats quoted from 2 Harvard researchers: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/20170239

References: https://www.psypost.org/2016/08/how-open-offices-are-killing-us-44478

 

employees

Reasons employees don’t always use Employee Assistance Programmes

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There are four reasons why employees don’t use EAP’s  and I’ll list them in the most-frequent order:

  • they don’t think it’s confidential
  • they feel there is a stigma for reaching out for help (especially for some men, who see this as a weakness)
  • they think they have to ask permission from their boss or HR
  • they don’t know it exists.

One of the main reasons that employees don’t use Employee Assistance Programmes is because they worry it might affect their position at work. They worry that getting in touch with a counsellor at an EAP will mean they become exposed.

At Headscience – every employee using the service is kept completely confidential. An employee contacts a phone number associated with Headscience and their name is never used on documentation, only a case number is used. Some statistics do get back to the employer but even this data is confidential as employee’s names are never used.

Second, it makes sense to reassure employees that every one of us has similar on and off-the-job struggles.  It’s no sin for people to reach out for help when the “allostatic load” (repeated stressors) gets piled too high and deep.

Third, just as the use of EAP is confidential, there is no need for employees to tell anyone, ask permission, go through HR channels, or do anything other than call the EAP phone number and make an appointment.

The last one puzzles me the most – often employees aren’t even aware that an EAP service exists. Headscience hopes to curcumvent this by doing regular workshops to make employees aware of our services.

Employee Assistance Programmes can make a huge difference to a company’s productivity and profit if they have happy staff.