“What do you do in your life to deal with stress?”
Most people in jobs will feel stressed at some point. It’s important to be able to deal with stress well by reducing its effects and coming up with solutions so you can move forward at work. If you’re getting ready for an interview, it might help to know how to answer questions about how you deal with stress so you can show how good you are at this skill. We’ll talk about why employers ask this question and how to give a good answer in this article. We’ll also give you some examples of answers that you can use as models for your own.
Why do employers care how you handle stress?
An employer may ask you how you deal with stress during an interview to find out what kind of person you are. From your answer, an employer may be able to learn more about how you deal with stress, what you do to lessen its effects, and whether or not you can handle stress-related problems to stay productive and reach your professional goals. All of this information can help an employer decide if you are a good fit for a job, its requirements, and the company’s work culture.
How to answer the question, “What do you do to handle stress in your life?”
Here’s how to give a good answer to this question, step by step:
1. Think about the skills you use that aren’t technical that help you deal with stress.
Before you write your answer, you should think about the different soft skills you can use to deal with stressful situations. For example, you might be able to reduce stress and move forward by using your communication, time management, organization, leadership, or problem-solving skills. You can keep bringing up these key skills in your answer to show the interviewer that you have the tools you need to deal with stress as a professional.
2. Tell me about a time when you were stressed out but found a good way to deal with it.
When answering this question, it can help to talk about a time when you were under pressure and came up with a creative way to deal with it. Talk about how you’ve dealt with stress in the past to give some background to the soft skills you thought about in the first step. For example, if you were stressed because your role didn’t make it clear what was expected of you, you could talk about how you used your communication skills to clear things up.
3. Don’t think about how you felt. Instead, think about what you did well.
Try to talk about the good things you did instead of the bad things you felt when you talk about your experiences with stress. Tell me how you dealt with stress and how it affected how well you did your job. This can show the interviewer that you are focused on finding solutions and that you have clear priorities as a professional.
4. You could talk about how you take care of yourself and how you deal with stress in your everyday life.
You could talk about how you take care of yourself as part of your answer. An interviewer may be most interested in how you handle stress at work, but it can be helpful to talk about how you take care of yourself to keep a healthy balance between work and life. This can show interviewers that you have a routine that prepares you to handle problems and stress at work every day.
5. Sum up how you feel about stress at the end.
You can sum up how you feel about stress and what you think about it in terms of your career as a way to end your answer. This will show the interviewer that you gave the question a lot of thought. For example, some professionals use stress to push themselves to do better work than usual. On the other hand, some people see stress as a normal part of their jobs and take steps to deal with its day-to-day effects.
How do you deal with the stress in your life?
You might be able to come up with a better answer to this question if you look at how other people have answered it. Here are three possible answers to help you get ready for your interview. All of them follow the rules listed above.
Example 1
“I’ve gotten better at dealing with stress over time, which has helped me in both my personal and professional life. For instance, when I worked as a nurse in the emergency room, there were a few months when my team didn’t have enough nurses on the floor to meet the needs of the patients. Working in the ED is fast-paced and stressful even on a normal day, but if you don’t have enough help, it can get very busy. Instead of letting stress stop me from doing my job, I used my organizational skills to make a better triage system.
This made the ED run better, so we could meet patients’ needs even when we didn’t have enough staff. Putting my new system into place helped me and my coworkers get through a hard time and make sure we were still giving good care. This is just one example, but I try to go to work every day with a similar solution-focused mindset. I take care of myself by meditating and working out during my free time. This makes me feel like I can handle any problem at work.”
Example 2
“In my last job as a communications assistant, I worked with a director whose job it was to figure out the scope of our projects, give us work, and set expectations. She often forgot to give me assignments until the last minute, which made it hard to meet deadlines. Even though I made sure to talk to her, explain my point of view, and ask her to be more clear about what she wanted, I knew I had to be proactive every day to reach my goals, no matter what the director did.
I started a new method in which I looked at the scope and tasks of each project on their own. From there, I made a plan for how to run the project until it was finished and set my own deadlines that were different from what the director wanted. I made sure to follow up with the director and remind her when she forgot to give out certain tasks. This made our whole team more productive. I’ve learned from this that a little bit of stress can help me come up with new ways to solve problems.”
Example 3
“As a teacher and in my own life, I’ve found that the best way to deal with stress is to stay organized. Many times, I didn’t feel like I had too much to do because I could keep track of things. One of our special education teachers quit suddenly at the end of the last school year to take care of a sick family member.
Even though the other teachers understood her decision, it put us in a tough spot because we had to work together to set up accommodations, file paperwork, and make sure the students who had been in her care did well. Thank goodness, I was able to make a schedule for everyone on staff to take turns on and off, so we could keep special education covered for the rest of the year while still doing our own jobs. We didn’t have any gaps in student progress by the end of the year, and I think that’s mostly because of the plan I made.”
