What does it mean exactly by “suffering from stress at work”? How can stress affect your health? These are vital questions if you are experiencing some unexplained symptoms, these could be the few early warning signs.

1. Do you experience frequent fatigue and exhaustion?
When you get too intense about your work and targets, you tend to overwork yourself. You also quit taking quality breaks between your days and over indulge into excessive mind exercise and low physical activity this makes you feel exhausted and burned out.

2. Do you get furious on those who make demands?
You are fighting in each possible way to achieve your targets and reach the unrealistic goals you have kept in front of yourself, this makes your work hectic and if at this situation someone from your team or home puts a demand in front of you, you get really mad. This is because you want everyone around you to think and feel like you. Such anger bursts get more common if you are working in a fixed deadline to deliver environment.

3. Do you indulge into self-criticism?
With so much of competition in today’s world you find yourselves bound to keep in the never ending race of proving excellence. This causes immense pressure on you and thus causes stress, when you are not able to meet some expectation you tend to criticize yourself. Competing in positive spirit is lost in this case.

4. How often do you experience Cynicism, negativity, and irritability?
With Increase in work pressure and self imposed guilt of incompetence, you give rise to frequent irritation and you start developing negative approach about each and every aspect of your life not just work, this is a deadly symptom. You get involved into all not required quarrels, disagreements and more. This also makes you feel lonely.

5. Do you easily explode at inconsequential events?
When something unplanned happens, and you are not prepared to handle it, you end up screwing it instead of resolving it. This is because you are not calm and balanced. With stress you lose your ability to judge and maneuver a situation.

6. Do you have frequent headaches and gastrointestinal problems?
Stress even disturbs your digestion and blood pressure, frequent headaches and stomach upsets are very early signs, of your building up stress at work. You can fix this by going on a physical exercise regime. You must also try taking small breaks while at work.

7. Are you losing or gaining weight?
One common symptom of facing stress at work is losing or gaining weight. If you are noticing this, you must evaluate the consequences that could be causing this. Stress affects your digestion and metabolism big time.

8. Are you experiencing sleeplessness and depression?
Stress at work, comes with you to home, this brings fear and anxiety too. You tend to sleep less and have problems to stay calm. You end up thinking a lot of negative stuff and this causes depression. This is totally curable if you put focus on your positive areas at work and home. One must leave work issues at work, while heading towards home. While at home you can do multiple things to keep you distracted from work related issues. Help your spouse in cooking, play with kids or simple do something you love to do.

9. Do you tend to be suspicious?
With all the negative thoughts, you end up becoming suspicious about everyone at work and even home, you feel like you are dealing with some kind of hidden strategy that people have built against you. You also develop doubts against your long time friends and coworkers. This is not good and such thoughts are clear indication that you need help in combating stress at work and bring positivism back into your life.

10. Do you feel helpless?
As stress keeps growing on you, you experience series of unwanted events and things. You hope for something good to happen and it turns out to be opposite. This generates fear and helplessness.

You can fight stress at work. It all will depend on how you get motivated to do your work and still feel no pain. Even a small change at work can help you avoid stress. In the never ending competitive world that we are living in it becomes important for us to perform and build an edge.

But it can also become too much at times, after all we are basically human and our body may not cope up with our unrealistic goals of super achieving.

Setting realistic goals is one important key to resolve most of your problems. One must try dividing a bigger task or project into small modules and thus keep motivated on reaching smaller target.