Week 2 of the Building Personal Resilience course, by Macquarie University on Coursera, focuses on the different types of stressors.

Stressors are the causes of stress and are of 4 types:

1. Time Demands: This typically comes into play when we are overwhelmed due to a lack of time to finish a task. Time passes by quickly as we approach the deadline. Please note this feeling of time passing by rapidly can also happen in activities where we have high engagement, such as reading a thrilling page-turner. Time stressors can increase fatigue and exhaustion and reduce our ability to work to our full capacity.

2. Interpersonal Conflicts: This happens due to conflicts with team members. There has been a focus on teams with diverse skill-sets in recent years. The underlying assumption of this is that a team with varied skillsets and backgrounds can solve problems better. While this may work well for problems requiring innovation, diversity may inadvertently hurt teams when they have a task to be accomplished in a standard way. Interpersonal conflicts stem from self-interest, and since each of us has varying self-interests, there is a likelihood of our interests conflicting with that of team members. In such cases, the fight/flight response takes over, and either we get into arguments with team members or we back off from the situation. In both cases, the impact is negative on our teams and us. Interpersonal conflict can arise due to the demands of our job for investing in emotional labour. Most people who work in customer-facing industries have experienced irate customers and would have had to hold back their true feelings and adhere to company guidelines while dealing with customers. These again take a toll on us.

3. Situational Stressors: This occurs due to unique circumstances in our environment. For example, someone travelling long distances daily to get to work may experience more stress. This could be because of the stress in navigating traffic or the fear of getting late to work. Studies have shown that most people prefer the ideal commute time to be 16 minutes. Recent work-from-home culture has led to people reporting that they miss the commute to work. This is because people use commute time to transition between work and home.

4. Anticipatory Stressors: These are situations where we undergo stress due to anticipation of unpleasant events. For example, a contract worker will experience stress closer to the end of the contract as they are anxious to know if the contract will be renewed or not.

The above is a short summary of my interpretation of learning’s from week 2 of the course, and I am eagerly looking forward to week 3!