Learning Center

Seven months ago I lost my spouse of 52 years. My grieving process has been complicated by the isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The isolation has deprived me of the opportunity to talk face-to-face with people and hug friends which I dearly miss.  However, it has not deprived me of the ability to manage my behavior and emotions with ...

Workplaces are entering uncharted waters as they try to figure out how to protect both the health of their employees and their businesses in response to a looming worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Company responses thus far have include halting non-essential business travel, cancelling professional conferences, having more employees work from home, forming task forces, dusting off emergency response plans, ordering increasingly ...

Our digital devices, the screens connecting us to an infinitely wide world of information, pose a significant challenge because they are so compelling and distracting. They pull our focus away from being in the moment and compromise our ability to concentrate on the essential tasks of daily life: paying attention to our loved ones, solving our work challenges, and practicing ...

It’s not a shocker to learn that a blog with a name like stress.health.business. (inaugurated in 2012) has featured more posts about stress than any other topic. However, you may be surprised to see how many different dimensions there are to the stress/productivity/health relationship. So, as we commence our 6th year of the blog, I have anthologized a diverse sampling ...

When I moved with my family from Maryland to Massachusetts 16 years ago, I told my husband and my realtor that my two top requirements were to be within 3 miles of a health club and a great coffee shop. This specification was not simply on my wish list, it was on my required list. At the time, I had ...

I can’t imagine that anyone would ever feel inspired to write an article about the “Top Five Reasons for Taking 100% of Your Pay.” Nobody requires encouragement to accept their entire compensation. So why do 41% of Americans not use all of their available vacation time? Why are people not using an average of 9.2 days per year of their ...

Next time you start feeling the unwelcome onset of stress and all of it’s debilitating symptoms, take a couple of deep cleansing breaths and apply some of the life saving techniques that astronauts have developed for staying calm in crisis situations. Astronauts have the most stressful, and dangerous, of occupations and their training is the gold standard for successfully managing ...

In our culture, which extols the merits of authenticity and transparency in everything from TED talks about leadership to advertisements for our food, it may seem a bit contrarian to make a case for the virtues of faking it. But I’d like to try.   Suppose you are the manager of a busy gift store at the height of the ...

Our hyper-connected, 24/7, ultra-competitive and globalized work environment is putting extraordinary stress on employees and their families. The health consequences to individuals and the financial costs to businesses add up to a problem of staggering proportions: Depression has become the leading cause of disability worldwide. Behavioral disability costs have increased more than 300% in the past decade and account for ...

If you take the pleasure of getting things done at work and multiply that by the pleasure of getting better at what you do, the result is improved job satisfaction, higher motivation and diminished levels of stress. It’s a simple formula: we come to work to get something done and when we do our level of well-being and engagement increase. ...

According to a recent survey of senior executives the success rate for major change initiatives is only 54%. Why do so many organizational change initiatives fail? Organizations are certainly aware that their success depends on the ability to change and adapt to rapidly evolving conditions effecting markets, customers, suppliers and competitors. They assign their top management talent, often reinforced with ...

There is nothing better than an impending disaster to clarify the distinction between the essential and the trivial. When total annihilation is on the horizon no one is wasting any time worrying about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. The standard formula for disaster movies builds upon the stark choices offered by the threat of total calamity. In response ...

Are you getting enough sleep? The National Sleep Foundation survey reports that 60% of us struggle with our sleep every night. Sleep problems, which are being linked to an ever expanding array of health and psychological problems, were recently described as “the new health frontier.” Employers, who are waking up to the mounting evidence documenting the impact of insufficient sleep ...

When I started working in the employee assistance profession, EAPs did not offer legal consultation services. If a distressed employee called us about a legal issue we could be sympathetic listeners and try to help them manage their anxiety about the problem, but we could not give them what they needed most which was immediate legal advice. I remember one ...

Let’s begin with the iconic image of Tom Hanks as the exasperated coach of a woman’s baseball team in the movie A League of Their Own, declaring “There’s no crying in baseball!” This image resonates for so many men because, let’s be honest here, some of us are flummoxed by tears and uncertain about how to respond to a person ...

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Abraham Joshua Heschel   Harold Ramis died last week. He cowrote and directed Groundhog Day, a ...

You know that jittery feeling you get before you have to make a presentation? Most people believe that trying to “calm down” is the best way to handle this kind of pre-performance anxiety. It turns out that most people have it wrong. A recent study, by Alison Wood Brooks at the Harvard Business School, investigated this problem and her findings ...

Sleep has become one of the hottest topics in medical and corporate circles. In the past 10 years there has been a mounting volume of studies, surveys and discoveries validating the fundamental importance of sleep. The National Institute of Health states it plainly: “sleep plays a vital role in your health and wellbeing throughout your life.” Insufficient sleep has been ...

If you were to ask a group of people if money can buy you happiness, I expect about half of them would say, “Of course it can” (while speculating on what kind of idiot asks a question with such an obvious answer). I think the other half would be just as convinced in the opposite direction: “Of course it can’t!” ...

A recent analysis from an international human resource company revealed that of the top 15 drivers of poor employee productivity the number one culprit is insufficient sleep. The remaining top 14 drivers of lost productivity were: depression; fatigue; back/neck pain; anxiety; hypertension; other emotional disorders; arthritis; obesity; chronic pain; headache; irritable bowel; high cholesterol; heart disease; and allergies.  Amazingly, eight ...

When that feeling of being under so much pressure at work starts to carry over and you feel just as driven at home, it’s time to slow down, not speed up.  We have gotten very good at doing more in less time, undertaking several things at once, processing ever more information, and constantly reacting with split second decisions. But these ...

At the end of the summer I can be certain that on the first cool sleeping night, when early fall is in the air, I will have my prototypical school anxiety dream. It’s a lock. I was predicting this annual event last week to an HR colleague who said: “I thought I was the only one who had those.” Judging ...