Recording your stress, can it help to prevent job stress?

Abstract

Job stress has been regarded as an important issue in the workplace. Hoboubi et al. (2017) proposed that job satisfaction and job stress are important factors that affect workforce productivity. Employees’ job stress not only influences their mind but also leads to poor performance at work. This research has been initiated with the assumption that the stress employees experience is similar to the stress they experience in the workplace. In addition, similar types of stress occur at the workplace and may be caused from meeting the same persons, same contents meetings, same location or same timings. We designed a web based calendar system called “My Stress Calendar” which provides various functions to subjectively record stressful events, relevant memos, and emotions. To evaluate it, we performed a within-subject research. Twenty subjects who are employees were recruited and evaluated for their perceived stress levels using a modified perceived stress scale, before and after using the system (Cohen et al. 1983). The results indicated that there was a significant difference in subjects’ perceived stress score between the experiments. It turned out that recording stressful events is helpful in preventing stressful events and leads the subjects to stable and positive emotions.