Stress Management This Report Is Written in

Stress Management This report is written in conjunction to the summary presentation on my research regarding stress management in the airline industry, specifically for the position of flight attendants. Flight Attendants, most often referred to as stewardesses and stewards, have the difficult aim of making flights safe, comfortable, and enjoyable for airline passengers. In a time of high priced flights, terrorism and unstable job prospects, these objectives in and of themselves are stressful.

The main purpose of this project therefore was to define and find solutions for some root causes of stress for flight attendants in the workplace.

In other words, this report should be able to help reduce some suffering in regard to stress caused by the pressures of the work life mix and hopefully provide viable solutions so that this mix is not a root cause of 'bad days.' The report focuses on the definition of stress and provides general statistics of physical and emotional stress related effects as they pertain to flight attendants. The report also provides some stress management applications that may prove helpful in providing relief from these factors.

"Fifty-nine percent of the workers that called ComPsych regarding workplace stress were men." (PR Newswire, 2001) But stress affects both men and women on the job. Statistics may seem skewed because men are in a majority in the workplace, but this report focused in on the United Airlines flight attendants who were mostly women and their stress levels are just as significant. Definition Stress can begin long before any passengers board a plane.

A Flight Attendant's work begins as an airplane's crew meets for preflight briefings which usually cover routes, forecast weather patterns, types of food or beverage services being offered as well as listing passengers with medical problems or unique requests. Anyone of these could cause stress. In our highly mobile and complex society, there are many definitions available for the word stress. This includes the medical definition which views stress as a measurable change within our bodies.

Of course, most people tend to forget that this is not an actual definition that is completely accurate because stress is a word that can be used to identify a hundred specific or nonspecific problems from our daily lives. The preflight briefing for example could inform a crew of serious weather concerns or an inadequate amount of food or water on board -- each of these items may or may not cause stress. Stress in and of itself is not actually our problem.

Stress is actually a buzzword that can be used for many things especially things that bother us. The key is that by combining all of our problems together into one basket and calling that basket 'stress,' we tend to overlook the fact that most people want and need relief from very specific scenarios or things such as anger, frustration or a cheating spouse. With that being said -- this report views stress as one's physical and emotional response to change.

For example, every Flight Attendant is usually assigned a work station which entails specific in-flight responsibilities. If the tools needed to accomplish these responsibilities is not available or broken, the duties may not be able to be properly completed which then creates either a physical or emotional response to the scenario.

If one's duty is to verify that first-aid kits or other emergency equipment is properly stored but they are not present, the lack of this equipment could prove to be critical in an emergency or totally irrelevant on a successful flight. Stress has both scope and magnitude. By scope, we mean how many people the change actually affects and by magnitude we mean the degree of the change's severity. Stress is not something that is always our fault.

Technically, most people see stress as something that is always negative but in fact, stress can be something that is either positive or negative. For Flight Attendants, food, beverages, blankets and reading material are excellent tools that reduce the scope and magnitude of stress. However, by greeting passengers with a smile and assisting them with the boarding process like checking tickets, hanging up coats or stowing luggage in the overhead compartment, flight attendants go a long way in reducing a passenger's stress while possibly adding to their own stresses.

There are specific characteristics that we humans have that can determine whether an individual can positively or negatively react to certain situations we could consider stressful. The ability to cope with change can be measured by: the ability to adapt, the relaxation response, one's age, one's personality which is a theorized concept and the overall environment.

There are also various levels of stress that affect us differently: Acute Stress Chronic Stress Acute stress can be viewed as an immediate reaction to a specific change that has been deemed as threatening to us in some way. The human body in its attempt to protect itself puts on some defensive postures such as an increase in Adrenaline production to speed up the organs. The body also stimulates the liver to release excess cholesterol, fats, glucose, and protein through the production of Cortisol.

The protection mechanism then shuts down immune system and elevates blood pressure by producing Oxycontin and Vasopressin. The body also attempts to increase the body's metabolism by stimulating the thyroid gland with TTH. Some may see this as the fight or flight response but this is merely the body's attempt to make it self fleet a foot. In a stress is perceived by the body as Chronic or stresses that could be.