Category: Stress

The technique made people feel more relaxed, detached and in control.

Playing games on a smartphone beats stress better than a mindfulness app.

People who played a shape-fitting game, similar to Tetris, felt less tired and more energised than those who used a mindfulness app, researchers have found.

Surprisingly, the mindfulness app made people feel worse when used after work over the course of a week.

Games can be effective in reducing stress because they are:

• distracting,
• relaxing,
• involve mastering a new skill,
• and let people feel in control.

Dr Emily Collins, the study’s first author, said:

“To protect our long-term health and well-being, we need to be able to unwind and recuperate after work.

Our study suggests playing digital games can be an effective way to do this.”

The first study in the research involved 45 people who were given a tricky math test to make them stressed.

Afterwards, one group played a game for 10 minutes, while two comparison groups used the Headspace mindfulness app or a fidget spinner.

The results showed that people felt more energised after playing the game than after using the mindfulness app or fidget spinner.

The second study had 20 working professionals playing a game every day after work or using the mindfulness app.

The results showed that those playing the game felt more relaxed, detached and in control — and this improved over the week.

In comparison, the mindfulness app made people feel worse over the week.

The more people enjoyed playing the game, the better they recovered from the stress of work, the results showed.

Professor Anna Cox, study co-author, said:

“Far from feeling guilty about being absorbed by their phone, people who play such games after a stressful day at work should know they are likely to be gaining a real benefit.”

The study was published in JMIR Mental Health (Collins et al., 2019).

Being prepared is important, but it needs a certain mindset to accompany it.

The key to staying positive is a combination of living in the moment and planning for the future.

Proactive planning is very effective at reducing stress.

Essentially, proactive planning means making plans for how to cope with inevitable problems.

For example, someone who knows they will be stuck inside all day makes themselves a schedule of activities to keep busy.

Similarly, a person who knows something will needlessly stress them out (say, the news) avoids it.

Although not every stressful event can be anticipated or ameliorated, many can.

Professor Shevaun Neupert, study co-author, said:

“It’s well established that daily stressors can make us more likely to have negative affect, or bad moods.

Our work here sheds additional light on which variables influence how we respond to daily stress.”

For the study, 233 people were tracked over 8 days.

Psychologists measured their ability to plan proactively along with their day-to-day levels of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the quality of living and appreciating the present moment.

Each day people reported the stressors they faced, how mindful they were and their mood.

The results showed that proactive coping helped people feel better.

However, planning ahead only worked to improve mood when people reported being mindful.

So, it is a combination of thinking ahead and living in the moment that helps people stay positive.

Professor Neupert said:

“Our results show that a combination of proactive coping and high mindfulness result in study participants of all ages being more resilient against daily stressors.

Basically, we found that proactive planning and mindfulness account for about a quarter of the variance in how stressors influenced negative affect.

Interventions targeting daily fluctuations in mindfulness may be especially helpful for those who are high in proactive coping and may be more inclined to think ahead to the future at the expense of remaining in the present.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Polk et al., 2020).

Both employees and their families suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.

The ‘always-on’ culture in modern organisations is killing people’s satisfaction with life.

Central to the always-on culture is monitoring email out of hours.

Merely expecting to be available for work creates considerable strain on employees and their families.

Both suffer anxiety and lower well-being as a result.

Dr William Becker, who led the research, said:

“The competing demands of work and nonwork lives present a dilemma for employees, which triggers feelings of anxiety and endangers work and personal lives.”

The study of 142 couples found that even without doing work during nonwork time, the expectation of work created stress.

Dr Becker said:

“…the insidious impact of ‘always on’ organizational culture is often unaccounted for or disguised as a benefit — increased convenience, for example, or higher autonomy and control over work-life boundaries,

Our research exposes the reality: ‘flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,’ compromising an employee’s and their family’s health and well-being.”

Dr Becker said:

“If the nature of a job requires email availability, such expectations should be stated formally as a part of job responsibilities.”

Instead, the best solution is to have periods of time when employees are not required to respond to email.

Dr Becker concluded:

“Employees today must navigate more complex boundaries between work and family than ever before.

Employer expectations during nonwork hours appear to increase this burden, as employees feel an obligation to shift roles throughout their nonwork time.

Efforts to manage these expectations are more important than ever, given our findings that employees’ families are also affected by these expectations.”

The study was published in the journal Academy of Management Proceedings (Becker et al., 2018).