This Just In - October 27th, 2007
Workplace is a second life for school bullies
Sat Oct 27, 1:01 PM
By The Canadian Press
For many, the modern workplace is another chance to relive the taunting and cruelty of middle school.
The bullies may wear business casual now, but in a random phone survey of office workers, 29 per cent of respondents said they still deal with rude or unprofessional co-worker behaviour.
Different troublemakers require individualized coping mechanisms, but directness, confidence and flexibility are essential in any confrontation, said Diane Domeyer, executive director of staffing company OfficeTeam, which conducted the survey.
"Recognize that it's not going to change overnight," she said. "Learn to adapt."
Meanwhile, avoid chatting with the office gossip lest his reputation damage your standing with colleagues. Defuse a belittler's invective by confidently asserting your position. Don't be afraid to tell her or a supervisor your feelings.
"Stand up and be brave," said Domeyer. "If you find over and over again that it's starting to affect your morale and productivity, that will affect your career."
OfficeTeam and research company International Communications Research interviewed 532 randomly selected full-or part-time adult office-dwellers in an unscientific August phone survey.
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Interesting survey - although unscientific - can be supported by other studies, including one by the ILO that rates Canada as the 4th most dangerous country in which to work due to high incidences of workplace violence. That said, I find the strategies for coping - "stand up and be brave" - may get you somewhere, but not very far in the grand scheme of things. You know from my previous posts that I have had my share of bullies for bosses, and so I decided to go on the record again, with some workable, practical strategies that anyone can use to survive and even thrive in the bully's environment. To take a listen, go to: http://juliechristiansen.mypodcast.com. The recording is about 5 1/2 minutes long. At the end of the recording, take advantage of the offer to download a free copy of my 4 page report on how to cope with bullies in the workplace.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Angry? Sleep on It!
Sleep Deprivation - from HR Magazine, May, 1999 by Stephenie Overman
You know the feeling: It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. You can't put together two intelligent sentences before your first cup of coffee. It takes longer than usual to complete your work duties.
It's called sleep deprivation and it affects some 70 million Americans, according to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The commission's studies show that work-related problems such as increased stress, inattention and diminished productivity are caused by workers' lack of sleep or poor quality sleep. The cost for U.S. businesses is estimated at $150 billion a year.
Read the whole article at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_5_44/ai_54711192
Now put that together with this article just released yesterday:
Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains
Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScienceLiveScience.com Mon., Oct 22, 12:20 PM ET
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
"When we're sleep deprived, it's really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions," researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
While past studies have revealed that sleep loss can impair the immune system and brain processes such as learning and memory, there has been surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects emotions, Walker said.
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
"While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn't predict they'd overreact as much as they did," Walker said. "They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, "and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes," Walker speculated. "Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It's a real oddity in nature."
The findings are detailed in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Read the whole article at http://www.sciencedaily.com.
What we can extrapolate from these two articles is that over 20% of the US population is sleep deprived; meaning that over 20% of the population may be experiencing overreactions in the emotional centers of the brain, when faced with negative stimuli. In other words, on a normal day, a person having had adequate sleep will be able to cope more effectively with negative stimuli than one who is sleep deprived.
When anger-inducing situations come your way, do you find you have no tolerance? Do you fly off the handle more quickly than you used to, and do you find that you are more stressed and less able to cope? The answer might be as simple as increasing the amount of time you spend sleeping each night.
The studies show that increasing the amount of sleep we get each night, and maintaining regular sleep patterns are ways to ensure that our brains can function at peak potential during our waking hours. Could resolving anger be that simple? While it takes more than a good night’s sleep to resolve anger, ensuring that your brain is well rested can take you a long way towards being able to evaluate your circumstances more clearly, and to make better choices about how you want to achieve positive outcomes in the face of anger.
You know the feeling: It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. You can't put together two intelligent sentences before your first cup of coffee. It takes longer than usual to complete your work duties.
It's called sleep deprivation and it affects some 70 million Americans, according to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The commission's studies show that work-related problems such as increased stress, inattention and diminished productivity are caused by workers' lack of sleep or poor quality sleep. The cost for U.S. businesses is estimated at $150 billion a year.
Read the whole article at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3495/is_5_44/ai_54711192
Now put that together with this article just released yesterday:
Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains
Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScienceLiveScience.com Mon., Oct 22, 12:20 PM ET
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
"When we're sleep deprived, it's really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions," researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.
While past studies have revealed that sleep loss can impair the immune system and brain processes such as learning and memory, there has been surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects emotions, Walker said.
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
"While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn't predict they'd overreact as much as they did," Walker said. "They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, "and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes," Walker speculated. "Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It's a real oddity in nature."
The findings are detailed in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Read the whole article at http://www.sciencedaily.com.
What we can extrapolate from these two articles is that over 20% of the US population is sleep deprived; meaning that over 20% of the population may be experiencing overreactions in the emotional centers of the brain, when faced with negative stimuli. In other words, on a normal day, a person having had adequate sleep will be able to cope more effectively with negative stimuli than one who is sleep deprived.
When anger-inducing situations come your way, do you find you have no tolerance? Do you fly off the handle more quickly than you used to, and do you find that you are more stressed and less able to cope? The answer might be as simple as increasing the amount of time you spend sleeping each night.
The studies show that increasing the amount of sleep we get each night, and maintaining regular sleep patterns are ways to ensure that our brains can function at peak potential during our waking hours. Could resolving anger be that simple? While it takes more than a good night’s sleep to resolve anger, ensuring that your brain is well rested can take you a long way towards being able to evaluate your circumstances more clearly, and to make better choices about how you want to achieve positive outcomes in the face of anger.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Prosperity Doesn't Increase Happiness in Alberta
This just in on Sunday: No commentary from me on this one... just lots to consider.
Survey suggests Albertans are unhappy with their quality of life
Published: Sunday, October 14, 2007 1:24 PM ET
Dean Bennett, CP
EDMONTON - You know there are anger problems in Canada's land of milk and honey when you find the highway literally covered in, well, milk and honey. Mental health counsellor Robert Peters says that's what happened in the case of one woman who played a high-speed road-rage game of cat and mouse on Calgary's Deerfoot Trail expressway with a man who cut her off.
The pair darted in and out of traffic - he swerving at her, she opening her grocery bag to launch comestible missiles through the driver's window.
"The woman later felt she'd better step forward (for help) because her children were in the back seat at the time and witnessed it," said Peters.
Her story is one of an increasing number of tales emerging in Canada's wealthiest province - a portrait of disquiet reflected in a new Harris-Decima survey of western Canadians conducted for The Canadian Press.
The online survey looked at the attitudes of 1,400 westerners, but found the most angst and unhappiness in Alberta, the province that leads the nation in growth and per capita wealth.
One in four Alberta respondents said they found people in the province generally grumpier and less civil compared with two years ago.
And despite multibillion-dollar budget surpluses and a provincewide construction boom to try to accommodate the teeming inflow of newcomers:
-24 per cent said the post-secondary education has worsened.
-28 per cent said grade-school education has deteriorated.
-51 per cent said their community has not improved or, in some cases, even worsened.
-70 per cent said there has been no improvement in their family's health and well-being.
The survey, conducted Sept. 10-12, is considered accurate within 2.6 percentage points 19 times out of 20. When just the 350 Alberta respondents are counted, the sampling error is plus or minus 5.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The level of dissatisfaction found in the survey is becoming apparent on streets and highways. Peters says more and more stories of road rage are cropping up in his counselling sessions, to the point where he decided separate group therapy dedicated to road rage was in order. His first pilot session began this weekend.
The idea took shape after he heard the grocery story and learned of a Calgary truck driver who was so fed up with being cut off that he tailed one offending vehicle with a family inside, overtook it and ran if off the highway, leaving it perched precariously at a 45-degree angle over a ditch.
The trucker was charged and had to attend anger management classes, although they were tailored to domestic violence.
"We need to address this particular road-rage phenomenon more actively and directly in group therapy," said Peters.
It appears there's also anger in Alberta's hospitals. The province's growing population has led to long waiting lines and bed closures due to lack of staff.
"It's getting worse," said Bev Dick, vice-president of the United Nurses of Alberta. "People are coming to the end of their rope faster and have almost come to the point of thinking that the louder they yell, the faster they're going to get attention."
A recent survey by the Canadian Institute for Health Information found close to half the province's 24,000 nurses have experienced some form of abuse.
"Verbal abuse is one of the most common, but certainly it is not uncommon that nurses are spit at, hit, kicked, or punched by patients or the patient's family," said Dick.
"There's plenty of downside to any boom, and our members are on the front lines to all of that."
Post-secondary students, meanwhile, are dealing with squeezed housing markets and soaring rents, said Michael Janz, president of the University of Alberta students union.
More than three-quarters of many student loans are used simply to pay the rent, said Janz, leading in some cases to students sleeping in offices or 24-hour common areas or, in one recent high-profile example, to a student sleeping in his buddy's shed.
"It's getting a little ridiculous," said Janz. "We're all thankful to be living in a bustling economy, but the boom's not always beneficial for everyone."
The crazy growth is fuelled by oilsands megaprojects in northern Alberta. The Fort McMurray area has been forced to deal with the social fallout of overcrowding, skyrocketing prices, and increasing crime and homelessness.
A 2006 survey found there were 441 homeless people in Fort McMurray, up 24 per cent from 2004.
"We don't have the shelter space to keep all these people off the streets this winter," said Rod McDonald, chairman of a committee that looked into the problem. He said they're making progress, citing a 200-bed shelter that is soon to open. Disturbingly, he said, the survey found that 65 homeless were children as young as 11 who survived by staying at various friends' places ("couch surfing," said McDonald) or, in the case of one-third of them, swapping favours for a place to sleep.
"We didn't specify in the survey what those favours might amount to, but you could imagine in many cases it could be sexual favours."
McDonald said more than half the young homeless admitted involvement in high-risk ventures like crime, numbers that may have helped spur the concern over lawlessness in the Harris-Decima poll. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they saw drug use getting worse, while close to half said their sense of security and safety was declining and 44 per cent viewed themselves at risk of physical harm. Those numbers, however, don't jibe with Statistics Canada figures released this summer indicating that as of 2006, the national crime rate was at its lowest in 25 years.
The overall crime rate fell five per cent in Alberta, though Edmonton, with 3.7 homicides per 100,000 residents, trailed only Regina (4.5) among major cities. "We have to do more to address the homicide rate here in Edmonton," said Sanjeev Anand, a University of Alberta law professor who studies youth crime. "But having said that, the rate is still low when you compare it to a lot of major American cities."
Survey suggests Albertans are unhappy with their quality of life
Published: Sunday, October 14, 2007 1:24 PM ET
Dean Bennett, CP
EDMONTON - You know there are anger problems in Canada's land of milk and honey when you find the highway literally covered in, well, milk and honey. Mental health counsellor Robert Peters says that's what happened in the case of one woman who played a high-speed road-rage game of cat and mouse on Calgary's Deerfoot Trail expressway with a man who cut her off.
The pair darted in and out of traffic - he swerving at her, she opening her grocery bag to launch comestible missiles through the driver's window.
"The woman later felt she'd better step forward (for help) because her children were in the back seat at the time and witnessed it," said Peters.
Her story is one of an increasing number of tales emerging in Canada's wealthiest province - a portrait of disquiet reflected in a new Harris-Decima survey of western Canadians conducted for The Canadian Press.
The online survey looked at the attitudes of 1,400 westerners, but found the most angst and unhappiness in Alberta, the province that leads the nation in growth and per capita wealth.
One in four Alberta respondents said they found people in the province generally grumpier and less civil compared with two years ago.
And despite multibillion-dollar budget surpluses and a provincewide construction boom to try to accommodate the teeming inflow of newcomers:
-24 per cent said the post-secondary education has worsened.
-28 per cent said grade-school education has deteriorated.
-51 per cent said their community has not improved or, in some cases, even worsened.
-70 per cent said there has been no improvement in their family's health and well-being.
The survey, conducted Sept. 10-12, is considered accurate within 2.6 percentage points 19 times out of 20. When just the 350 Alberta respondents are counted, the sampling error is plus or minus 5.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The level of dissatisfaction found in the survey is becoming apparent on streets and highways. Peters says more and more stories of road rage are cropping up in his counselling sessions, to the point where he decided separate group therapy dedicated to road rage was in order. His first pilot session began this weekend.
The idea took shape after he heard the grocery story and learned of a Calgary truck driver who was so fed up with being cut off that he tailed one offending vehicle with a family inside, overtook it and ran if off the highway, leaving it perched precariously at a 45-degree angle over a ditch.
The trucker was charged and had to attend anger management classes, although they were tailored to domestic violence.
"We need to address this particular road-rage phenomenon more actively and directly in group therapy," said Peters.
It appears there's also anger in Alberta's hospitals. The province's growing population has led to long waiting lines and bed closures due to lack of staff.
"It's getting worse," said Bev Dick, vice-president of the United Nurses of Alberta. "People are coming to the end of their rope faster and have almost come to the point of thinking that the louder they yell, the faster they're going to get attention."
A recent survey by the Canadian Institute for Health Information found close to half the province's 24,000 nurses have experienced some form of abuse.
"Verbal abuse is one of the most common, but certainly it is not uncommon that nurses are spit at, hit, kicked, or punched by patients or the patient's family," said Dick.
"There's plenty of downside to any boom, and our members are on the front lines to all of that."
Post-secondary students, meanwhile, are dealing with squeezed housing markets and soaring rents, said Michael Janz, president of the University of Alberta students union.
More than three-quarters of many student loans are used simply to pay the rent, said Janz, leading in some cases to students sleeping in offices or 24-hour common areas or, in one recent high-profile example, to a student sleeping in his buddy's shed.
"It's getting a little ridiculous," said Janz. "We're all thankful to be living in a bustling economy, but the boom's not always beneficial for everyone."
The crazy growth is fuelled by oilsands megaprojects in northern Alberta. The Fort McMurray area has been forced to deal with the social fallout of overcrowding, skyrocketing prices, and increasing crime and homelessness.
A 2006 survey found there were 441 homeless people in Fort McMurray, up 24 per cent from 2004.
"We don't have the shelter space to keep all these people off the streets this winter," said Rod McDonald, chairman of a committee that looked into the problem. He said they're making progress, citing a 200-bed shelter that is soon to open. Disturbingly, he said, the survey found that 65 homeless were children as young as 11 who survived by staying at various friends' places ("couch surfing," said McDonald) or, in the case of one-third of them, swapping favours for a place to sleep.
"We didn't specify in the survey what those favours might amount to, but you could imagine in many cases it could be sexual favours."
McDonald said more than half the young homeless admitted involvement in high-risk ventures like crime, numbers that may have helped spur the concern over lawlessness in the Harris-Decima poll. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they saw drug use getting worse, while close to half said their sense of security and safety was declining and 44 per cent viewed themselves at risk of physical harm. Those numbers, however, don't jibe with Statistics Canada figures released this summer indicating that as of 2006, the national crime rate was at its lowest in 25 years.
The overall crime rate fell five per cent in Alberta, though Edmonton, with 3.7 homicides per 100,000 residents, trailed only Regina (4.5) among major cities. "We have to do more to address the homicide rate here in Edmonton," said Sanjeev Anand, a University of Alberta law professor who studies youth crime. "But having said that, the rate is still low when you compare it to a lot of major American cities."
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