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Have you ever tried meditation? Regularly practicing this can impact you in your life and career. Learn how to meditate at work, here.

Worrying about deadlines, work flow or employee issues is natural for people working in the business world. Stress happens. You have options, though, on how you deal with stress.

Sometimes, taking a moment to recenter yourself is all you need to do: By putting things into perspective, you can find the grit to keep going. That’s not always the best course of action, though. If you find that a particular task or job regularly leaves you feeling overwhelmed, drained or quietly angry, you may want to rethink how you approach the work or even consider whether you’d be better suited for a different sort of job or different company.

Emily Irish

Stress has always been a part of the workplace. No matter how “good” your job is and no matter how good of a boss you are, your employees will face stress on a daily basis—and that applies to businesses of any size, in any era. How your workers handle that stress (and how they respond to it) will bear a massive impact on your overall performance as an organization, so it’s on you to help them manage that stress more effectively.

Today’s young businesses—often led by millennials or forward-thinking serial entrepreneurs—are finding newer, more innovative, and more personal ways to help employees cope with stress.

So much of your job isn’t about hitting goals, but rather about being rooted in reality, constantly striving to bring perspective and empathy to whatever situations you encounter. Sometimes, finding the right words can be the biggest challenge of your day. But other times, you’re overthinking it, and it’s as simple as saying these six tiny sentences.

Sometimes we need to escape our stress before our stress takes us down.

Mental illness at work is still a precarious and lonely experience for many employees. Stephen Bevan of the Institute for Employment Studies looks at four areas where more progress is vital. This article is in support of this week’s “Free your mind” cycle ride in aid of the Black Dog campaign to end the stigma of mental health problems.

Jamie Lawrence, Editor, HRZone: What will crack the insidious problem of men just not feeling able to take parental leave or even admit to employers they want to spend time caring for their children?

Sir Cary Cooper, Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health, Manchester Business School: It’s a really big issue. Men don’t apply for parental leave or flexible working as much as woman do and that is a real issue.

And the reason they don’t - I’ve done a big study funded by the Lottery fund and I did it with Working Families and a colleague from Lancaster - and we looked at both a large public and private sector body and tried to find out why men don’t do this.

And the answer was "it will adversely affect my career." Yet women apply - they also feel it will adversely affect their career but not to the same extent that men do.

Because for men it’s about them feeling that the organisation will think they’re less committed - and they’re not, and won’t be, they are just trying to engage with their family and participate and be ‘new mannish’ and get some good balance between work and life but what inhibits them is the fear that taking flexible working and parental leave will adversely affect their careers.

Four steps to stop it.

Feeling stressed lately? Chances are you're not alone. We carry varying degrees of stress around with us all the time—sometimes more, sometimes less. Does that pressure make us more productive or less? As with so many aspects of human psychology, the answer is: It depends. But what it depends on is something called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, a theory that dates back to 1908. Here's how understanding it can help you channel the stress you may be feeling into energy to get things done.

The Yerkes-Dodson curve relates the amount of motivational energy, called "arousal," a person may possess to how well they'll perform at a given task. The basic idea is that at low levels of arousal, people don't perform particularly well. In this state, people aren't all that motivated to get much done. That helps explain why being totally stress-free can breed laziness or complacency, and also why some of your most productive days are those when the clock is ticking for you to wrap up a big projec

Say you’re a high performer who's risen through the ranks. Now you have even bigger responsibilities. Or you're working your way toward a promotion and need to show your skills and professionalism in the best light. Then the phone call comes. The results of your medical tests weren't good. Or you suddenly have to take care of a loved one in an emergency. Or there's an unexpected financial hit that could spell catastrophe.

Whatever the situation, your life just got much more complicated. While intuitively you know that these things can happen to anyone, the anxiety of dealing with such troubling events, coupled with the pressure to continue to perform in your job, amps up the stress to DEFCON 1.

"A curveball like that requires sharpening your coping skills and expanding them so that you can deal with what’s being demanded of you," says clinical psychologist Alicia H. Clark, adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. And there is a strategic approach you can take to help you cope and perform better, even when you’re operating under extreme stress.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control.

Stress has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it, but how you respond is only half the battle. The secret to winning the war against stress lies in what you do when you aren’t working (and presumably aren’t as stressed). Otherwise, you fall into bad habits that can magnify your stress, rather than alleviate it. You need to shift gears to these relaxing and rejuvenating activities during your time off.

Leaders of high-intensity, high-performing organizations are beginning to recognize the important effects of mindfulness, exercise, and sleep on the body and the brain.