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Stress can be defined as emotional and physical strain caused by our response to pressure from the outside world. Common stress reactions include tension, irritability, inability to concentrate, and a variety of physical symptoms that include headache and a fast heartbeat. Stress is one of the biggest problems for many people.

Stress has severe impacts on people’s lives, firm’s productivity and nation’s welfare. Stress is recognized as the number one killer today. The American Medical Association stated that stress was the cause of 80 to 85 percent of all human illness and disease or at the very least had a detrimental effect on our health. American businesses lose an estimated $200-$300 billion dollars per year to stress related productivity loss and other cost. To put this in perspective, this amount is higher than the total cost related to all strikes and the net profit from all Fortune 500 companies.

Stress can be caused by many factors, which are caused stressors. Stressors can be both physical and emotional. Physical stressors are for example pain, exhaustion, noise, cold. Emotional stressors can be negative feeling, fear, work related problems and so on.

Although different types of stressors should be dealt with in different manner, in many cases stress can be efficiently reduced by good time management. In many cases stress is caused by the facts that we do not have a clear picture what we should do, we feel ourselves overwhelmed, we miss deadlines and have too little leisure time.

One of the main causes of stress is that we do not have control over our projects. We know that we have to do something, but we do not know what exactly. In these kinds of situations we often do not now how to start a project, we tend to delay starting with it and when we finally get ourselves going we end up in doing wrong things. This results in poor work quality and missed deadlines, which again generates stress. We may feel that we are worthless and that we will always fail.

Many people spend much of their time on urgent activities. It means that they are always in a hurry. There are so many things that have to get done now (or actually they should have been finished earlier) It creates constant pressure and there is not much room for error. If that kind of situation is persistent then it results in high stress levels.

Time management will enable you to get things under control. Among other things it includes finding your life purpose and setting long-term goals. And then you start making changes in your time use, which will allow you to spend more time on the activities, which will give you benefits in the long run and on the activities, which you like to do the most.

If you focus more on the most important activities then it will make your life more purposeful and happier. You will not find yourself so much in a hurry than before and there will be less stress for you. Lower stress-level will increase your self-confidence and your work-performance will improve.

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