In his classic, The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran writes, “Always you have been told that work is a curse ... but I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.”

Unfortunately Kahlil’s words don’t jibe with a new Australian study that found almost one in six cases of depression among working people are caused by job stress, that nearly one in five (17 percent) of working women suffering from depression attribute their condition to job stress and more than one in eight (13 percent) of working men do the same. In the last decade, the number of American workers that say job stress is a major problem in their lives has doubled. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health reported that 70 percent of physical and mental complaints at work are related to stress.

What do we do? Bring our Kleenex to work and hope we aren’t caught crying, or give our notice with no other job in reach? Thankfully, we have a few steps between these two extremes.

1. Don’t Quit Yet
Let me just say this first: chances are higher that you will feel worse if you quit than if you keep on showing up to a job that you hate. Why? If you’re not working, you’ll have even more time to think about how much you hated your job on top of the acute anxiety, you feel when you think about how you’re going to pay your next phone, electric, and mortgage bill without the regular paycheck being deposited automatically into your bank account. And then there’s the isolation of having no one to talk to during the day, because, one small detail: everyone else you know is probably working. So just sit tight until you read through, say, ten of these tips before you gladly give your notice, okay?

2. Learn Some Calming Techniques
You know what’s cool about most relaxation techniques? You can do them while you’re listening to your boss give you your next assignment. Let’s say, as he’s telling you that he hired a nice woman half your age that you now report to, that you suddenly feel lots of tight pressure in your shoulders—naturally, because you have the desire to slug him. You relax your shoulders in a way that relieves some of that tension and tells your body that slugging him isn’t an option (right now, anyway).

Then, as you walk back to your desk, where the kid right out of college hands you five assignments due by the end of the day, you can take ten deep breaths, counting to four as you inhale and to four again as you exhale. If you’re allowed to listen to music or white noise at work (or if you work from your home, as I do), you might want to invest in a CD of ocean waves. Whenever I listen to mine, I take a few seconds to visualize myself on the sandy beach of Siesta Key, Florida, hunting for seashells; it’s a short moment that allows me to catch my sanity.

3. Turn Your Things Off
I’m not talking about your sex drive, although if you’re depressed, chances are that that’s off, too. I mean your BlackBerry or iPhone, or at least the “ding” noise alerting you to every new (“URGENT!”) email that you don’t think drives you crazy but does. Trust me. When you turn it off for an afternoon, a day—or even commit to a weekend without it!—you’ll see that it’s responsible for a sizable chunk of your madness.

It’s ironic that very technological advances that were supposed to free us end up imprisoning us to our work, argues integrative doctor Roberta Lee in her astute book The Superstress Solution. In her introduction, she cites a recent survey commissioned by Support.com: forty percent of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds said they couldn’t cope without their cell phone, yet the same students reported less stress and had lower heart rates and blood pressure when they stopped using them for three days.

You don’t need to join the monastery. Just try turning things off for a few evenings and see how you feel.

4. Make a Schedule and Stick to It
Yes, I’m a tad obsessive-compulsive, but I can feel the stress in me rise and threaten explosion if I don’t have a handy-dandy schedule in front of me that I can follow. No one gives it to me. I make it up, and therein lies its power—I am taking control back into my own anxious hands! So, upon getting five assignments due the same week from a supervisor, I do the panic dance for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I take out my work calendar and start nailing down my deadlines. Assignment one needs to be done by lunchtime on Tuesday. Assignment two needs to be done by Thursday morning, so that I have two full days to complete Assignment three before the week is over. Get it? Things don’t typically run that smoothly, of course, but by breaking down the goals or tasks into manageable bites, I stress less and produce more.

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