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Most adult Americans spend at least a third of their day at work. Work takes up a significant portion of one’s life, and trying to nurture that space to make it as fruitful and joyful as possible makes a lot of sense. Work, however, is often a challenging place, for many different reasons. The predictable result of these challenges is workplace stress, which can affect one’s health and overall well-being. Facing Workplace Challenges Why is work so stressful? Every environment that you’re in is challenging for one reason or another. With work, there may be specific reasons why it’s challenging. Those reasons may be related to the work itself or the conditions in which the work is performed. One thing that makes the workplace challenging and stressful is that the choices you make can affect your company’s bottom line. If you make a bad call, you could cost your company anything from hundreds of dollars to millions. College and high school are stressful, but if you fail, the impact of that failure is often quite localized to you and the people who care about you. A company could be liquidated because of a mistake, costing others their jobs. The work that you do may itself be stressful. Some jobs have literal life-or-death stakes, or they carry a lot of pressure, like being responsible for a city’s electrical grid or being the one responsible for others’ well-being and success. You might find the work enjoyable, but because the work affects others in significant ways, it ramps up the pressure. If there is a lot of work, that too adds to the stress. Workplace relationships also play a role in whether work is stressful. If your relationships with colleagues, subordinates, or your boss are fraught with conflict or significant misunderstandings, that [...]

Ever notice how it’s sometimes easier to talk to a stranger about your problems than those closest to you? It’s counterintuitive, of course, but it’s true. When we share something that is going on in our lives with someone we don’t know, we don’t have to worry about how they might judge us or how the relationship might be negatively impacted by our confessions. There’s also less fear of rejection because the connection is temporary, so it feels like there’s less at stake. Strangers also offer a fresh perspective. They don’t carry preconceived ideas about us or our specific situations, which can make it easier to be open and honest in our conversation. You might feel that you can speak freely without the burden of expectations or complicated and biased history when you don’t know the person on the other side of the conversation. There is a certain freedom in knowing that you can share something without worrying about it coming up in future conversations. There’s no past or shared context. There is no expectation or fear of manipulation. These conversations with random strangers allow us to speak freely, without concern about this conversation or our next interaction. I’m not advocating that you unload your worries onto an online message board for all the world to see. Nor am I encouraging you to corner that friendly-looking lady at the coffee shop. But I am encouraging you to seek this type of emotional release with a professional Christian therapist. With a therapist, you can express the internal pressure that sometimes comes with talking to close family and friends without the fear of bias, retaliation, or your biggest fear being discussed at the next family dinner. What’s great about this type of “stranger” is that they have tools to help you [...]