On the way to achieve highly ambitious dream, people fall into the trap of high expectation and high workload of the corporate culture. According to CDS, about 29 – 40% of people are under extreme stress at work. Sadly, work stress has adverse effects on health, ranging from problems like common cold or the flu to more serious issues like heart diseases. There is not a single company whose employees are not stressed; stress is a normal thing in any kind of workplace. However, instead of suffering the anxiety caused by the stress the realistic idea would be to find ways to reduce it. Here are stress management techniques at work to help you out.
1. Begin Your Day Correctly
In the morning after feeding your children and sending them to school, you leave for your office, on the way you have to face the rush hour traffic and battle road rage. In this hurry, you always forget to have a filling breakfast and just gulp down a cup of coffee. By the time you reach work you are already stressed out. In fact, if you look closely you will notice that on the days you have stressful mornings the rest of your day is also filled with anxiety and you tend to react more to it than usual. So always make sure that you never skip your breakfast, workout in the morning and plan your day before you leave. After you wake up make a to-do list and jot down the things you need to complete that day and follow it. Lastly, have a positive attitude; positive thinking will help you stay calm as well as help you a lot in dealing with the anxiety easily.
2. Don’t React, Act
In this corporate work culture, most of the time we experience stress is when we find a situation that is out of our control. Our stress hormones get activated in such situations and if the problem progresses our self-confidence crumbles and wears down our well being. In such scenario, we should try to identify the facets of the issue that we can control and the ones we cannot so that we can control some part of the situation and try to let go of the rest. If you continue this then handling work stress will become a piece of cake for you.
3. Know What Is Required
Unclear requirements lead to job burnout. If you have doubts regarding what your colleagues require from you ask them at once without any hesitation or delay and get your doubts cleared. This is because you will find yourself more stressed out if you do not know what is required from you or how you are expected to work. Whenever you face such a situation talk to someone, who may help you with understanding your requirements for the job.
4. Avoid Self-Imposed Stress
Sometimes we think too much about what people perceive about us. We tend to focus on the minutiae as well as procrastinate. However, in reality, once we shift our focus from what others think and just focus on the work at hand, we successfully achieve the goals and our colleagues are impressed as well.
5. Be Comfortable
Another well-known factor for stress is physical discomfort. You may not notice the stress of an uncomfortable chair within the first few minutes. However, when you practically sit on that chair for hours during office you will have sore backs and you will be more reactive to stress. This will lead to frustration and even the little noises on the office floor will irritate you. In this case, what you can do is make sure that your workplace is quiet and comfortable.
6. Do Not Multitask
Once upon a time, multitasking was ballyhooed as an excellent way to maximize time and get more work done in a day. Later people started to realize that when they had phone on one ear and making calculations on the side as well as feeding the numbers into the computer at the same time, their speed and accuracy gets diminished. So complete one task at a time. By doing so, your task will be completed on time with perfection.
7. Interruptions
While we are at work we are bombarded with emails, phone calls, messages, deadlines that urgently need to be finished. These distractions conspire to distract us. Even though we cannot control such interruptions, we can definitely control our reaction. In order to do this, we can either accept all the Interruptions coming our way, ignore it or assess its importance or then plan what to do. There are some reoccurring interruptions where you can fix criteria whether an interruption is worthy of a response or not. You can also set aside a specific time of the day for answering all your emails. Doing this thing will automatically reduce a large part of all the interruptions that you face throughout the day.
8. Breathe
Whenever you feel frustrated, you react to stress more often. Instead of reacting negatively to everything, try to cool down first, take a deep breath and relax. If you do it correctly then you will feel a cooling effect of this breathing exercise. This will help you to calm down and give you the time to think. You must know the art to de-stress yourself.
9. Sleep Well
When we don’t sleep properly out our body doesn’t rejuvenate the lost energy properly. Our brain does not get enough rest and we have trouble focusing on our work the next day. We feel tired, irritated and prone to get stressful. So try to restrict the usage of your cell phone before going to sleep. Meditate for 10 minutes and just do some breathing exercise; you will definitely have a good night sleep.
To conclude we can say that stress is a part of our life and we have to know different ways in order to deal with it. In order to have a better work life balance, we have to manage our work and always remember to be positive and confident. Stress is nothing but a reaction to problems that we think are impossible, yet possible if only we keep calm and stay focused and everything will go smoothly.