With faster lifestyles, global workforces and 24/7 schedules, the impact of workplace stress is becoming severe on working professionals across the world. Today, stress may be caused due to a variety of factors, not just the pressure to perform under severe deadlines. The cause of stress may result from your interaction with superiors and co-workers, personal problems such as troubled marriages or bereavement that spill into your office life, performance and teamwork issues, low self-esteem, fear of job loss, and health issues.

A little stress is actually useful because it fires away the body’s self-defense mechanisms – alertness, high adrenalin levels, etc. However, prolonged stress can do a lot of damage. For people in demanding professions such as travel, sales, hospitality and medicine, as well as self-employed professionals, stress can extract a high toll. To beat stress before it gets you down, you must recognize the early warning signs.