breathe….blow out the stress, breathe in the relaxation!
This month we are talking about ways to handle stress in your workplace. While working in a library is wonderful in a lot of ways; we all know that it also brings us some stressful moments.
You need to take less than five minutes, right now, and just have some time to breathe and let your mind wander in happy directions. Take a nice deep breath in, hold for a second, and then breath out with gusto. Do this another time or two, and just let your worries fade to the background for a while. (They will be there later; so you can just forget about them for right now!)
Stress reduction can be enhanced by watching nature. So if you are somewhere you can look at fish, stare out the window at some green space, or pat your dog or cat – do that. And if you want to just relax and let nature come to you, we have a nice video of the Acadia National Park in Maine. Let it inspire you to go out after work or over the weekend and do your own walking around in nature, for the best relaxation!
Stress affects everyone, and end-of-year stress can be particularly difficult. Many of us are struggling to finish up all our work for the end of the semester, or celebrating holidays and all that comes with it, in addition to dealing with every single other thing that was already driving us crazy all year long! Patrons have less patience, money is suddenly tighter, and all kinds of extra programs can just cause even the best-balanced library person to hit a breaking point.
CMLE is here to help you. This month we will provide all kinds of information about stress, to help you learn more about it, and learn some strategies for managing stress. You cannot stop stress from happening, but we can all learn better ways to increase our resilience so stress does not knock us out!
One easy way to help is to listen to podcasts.
Of course, there are all kinds of librarian podcasts out there, and we recommend those as nice way to keep up with interesting things happening in the profession!
We all feel it, and the end of year can bring all kinds of extra stress for us with the semester winding down and holiday celebrations winding up. Working in libraries is no protection against workplace stressors; in fact, working with patrons – which is generally rewarding – can provide a significant amount of stress in our daily work.
I have spent a lot of time talking with library people across the country about workplace stress, and it was pretty depressing. Most of us are here because we enjoy our jobs, they provide us with a lot of professional satisfaction, and despite the problems we face libraries are still great places to work!
But minimizing discussion of workplace stress just minimizes the real problems we face. It is better to face the issue, and to help ourselves and our staff to resolve problems that can be fixed and to get some training to handle problems that cannot. Stress causes all kinds of problems, from an uncomfortable workplace to workers suffering from burnout and never able to return to their jobs. Employee health is an important part of providing good service, and stress can just torpedo that.
Everywhere I went to conferences to talk about stress, people would come up to me and whisper that they were glad someone was talking about this. They thought they were alone in it, that they were doing something wrong because they were feeling stress.
Ignoring stress does not make it go away!
Thinking that “real” librarians wouldn’t get stressed is incorrect!
Acknowledging this is an issue in our profession is important – and the best way to help us all to overcome it. We need to think about ways to manage workplace stress on the individual level, in our library organizations, and across the profession.
So this is our December Monthly Topic: Stress Management. We can’t fix everything in your workplace, but we hope we can give you some tools to work with and some ideas to think about in your library. Continue reading Stress Management: Why Bother??→
We know December is still several weeks away, but it is such a busy time of year, we wanted to let you know about this event so you can mark your calendars now!
We decided to make the Monthly Topic for December Stress Management. This is because the end of the year can be a stressful time in libraries. There is so much going on, and everyone else is busy and stressed so they are not helping to calm things down!
But this is not just a seasonal issue. Mary’s research into stress in libraries has shown there is a LOT of stress happening in libraries all over the place – probably including yours! Library people have been embarrassed to admit being stressed at work, even though we have plenty of stressors – but it has not been discussed often enough.
So in this seminar we will look at some common stressors in libraries, and identify some strategies for addressing them. And we will work through some skills for personal relaxation, to help us survive the end of the year chaos, then take our new skills of stress management into the new year!
We will offer this seminar twice in-person on Tuesday, December 6: from noon to 1:30, and again from 4:30 to 6:00. You are invited to attend either in-person session (they are identical). Feel free to bring your food! We will provide beverages. Web material will be available for members unable to attend.
Parents and teachers have been concerned with the increase of stress in their students’ lives. Leigh Ann Whittle of Edudemic visited Visitacion Valley Middle School to see their meditation program in action, and featured them in her post, An Effective Approach to Reduce Students’ Stress.
Whittle offers several meditation activities to try, as well as advice on how to implement a meditation program in your setting. Here are Edutopia’s four steps to implementing one:
Identify Key Problems Determine what behavior problems need to be addressed by meditation – this could be truancy, academics, traumatic experiences, etc.
Prepare for Implementation Inform yourself with relevant research to convince colleagues and parents of the benefits of a meditation program, and teach the faculty and students basic meditation techniques.
Determine How Meditation Time Will Be Spent Meditation time is quite time, but not inactive time – encourage students to find what relaxation techniques work best for them, whether it’s reading, drawing, or something else.
Adjust School Space and Schedule Accordingly Designate a specific space for meditation time, and adjust the school schedule to accommodate your new meditation program.
Meditation isn’t beneficial only to students – give these a try yourself (if you’re not using meditation techniques already), and share with your colleagues!
