Workplace stress, whether personal, occupational or organizational, saps performance and cost effectiveness from the workplace each and every day. On one level, we may do best to be realistic about our work performance and efficiency. On the other hand, we want to know all we can and do all we can do to address any issue that may hold back optimum performance, strong and stable productivity, and cost effectiveness.

Consider how the traditional view of stress works. As a snapshot, we have traditionally utilized moral and ego based practices to 'discipline' our stress, or to get us to ignore stress impulses in favor of goal achievement and consistent, competitive productivity. In the workplace, we may have strong superegos that do our own disciplining of our stress impulse for us, or we may have stern disciplinarians who police workplace habits and negatively motivate workplace action over stress issue consideration.

We have historically called people lazy,weak or slow to get them to overcome their attention to stress. We have threatened them for under-productivity, shamed them for relaxing when they should be-like an idealized type A personality-always on the go. We complain about their complaining and we comment on every consideration stemming from the Protestant work ethic we inherited from our forefathers and mothers. Why should we be any different? Have any of us really had sufficient exposure to emotionally intelligent ways for stress awareness and management? Would we even know the difference between situational and cyclical stress?

Our forefathers gave us a valuable tool when the Protestant work ethic was adopted for productivity. Unfortunately, they had not evolved psychological awareness to the point that our world has, in the 21st Century. While our forefathers cursed, condemned and fired anyone who was not ideally productive, we have cultivated a variety of analytical tools and metrics to identify the down side of this kind of ambition without optimizing for human ecology. Since the 1940's, corporations have been the main force in calling for studies in stress, occupational stress, stress in the workplace, and organizational stress. They were seeing experientially the casualties of excessive and protracted stress, from type A personality heart attack and premature death to the latest statistics that suggest the number one reason for use of sick days is stress.

Research has led to the recognition of emotionally intelligent responsibilities and expectations, though we still have a ways to go before managers are trained to see clearly when they are responding to a performance issue and when they are managing their own stress through hiring and firing behaviors. The moral and ego traditions of stress management are to say the least pervasive. They go back to childhood, to how our parents managed stress around us. They are reinforced throughout especially male social dynamics, though women are not immune, from kids playing king of the hill, to competition on the freeway home.