Professional Life and Stress

¶ … dangerous result of being overworked or weighed down with too many responsibilities, stress can be detrimental on both a personal and professional level. Personally, as the article summary mentioned, stress can result in physical ailments that can impact or even shorten one's life. In addition, stress can greatly affect a person's emotional and mental well-being. People who experience a great deal of stress can become angry, feel anxiety, and even try to relieve their stress by acting in an inappropriate manner toward their loved ones. Because of this, stress can ultimately end up taking a toll on a person's relationships, as well as his or her mental and physical health.

While these reasons make stress dangerous for one's personal life, they can also be interpreted as dangerous for one's professional life, or career. Workers under too much stress probably cannot think clearly, and the stress may be impacting their sleep patterns, resulting in the fact that they are not alert on the job. Thus, stressful workers are not good workers, but workers who are simply trying to get through another day hiding their symptoms of stress. This not only has implications for the employee, who should think twice before taking on a large number of social, community, and extracurricular obligations, but also for the employer. Employers who know that stressed employees do not produce as good of work as employees who are not under stress will be more likely to limit the amount of responsibilities levied on each employee. In order to prevent problems in their workplaces, workers can solve stress issues before they become blights on the company or organization by simply reducing the employees' workloads. Thus, while everyone feels stress from time to time, chronic stress can be a problem for one's personal and professional life.

Response to Summary Two

When job burnout occurs, some believe it can be either positive or negative. For some, working in one place for too long can be boring, and burnout is a sign that they should move on to other things. For others, job burnout occurs because of the demands and stress of a certain job. For instance, the comments in this discussion suggest that nurses may feel burnout faster than those in other professions because their jobs often demand more of them. Nurses have to be on their feet for much of their shifts, meaning that the sheer physical exhaustion of nursing is immense. In addition, nurses must often deal with unpleasant circumstances such as complaining patients, human waste, and death and sickness. The emotional toll of such work may begin to push nurses toward burnout, as might the fact that nurses must often work with a sense of urgency, increasing the pressure, and therefore stress on them. For some nurses, this process becomes so frustrating and stressful that they do not want to go back to work the next day.