The ability to manage stress in an effective way is very important to live a balanced life. The following techniques will help you to relief stress.
What are the benefits of stress management?
Stress, the body’s reaction towards stressful situations, is a state of mental suspense that can have negative influences on our lives and on our health. Stress management helps you to reduce the negative side-effects of stress and allows you to handle stressful situations calmer than before.
In short: it helps you to improve your ability to cope with stress and to avoid stress related conditions, such as chronic headaches, heart diseases and depression. Another benefit of stress management techniques is that it will help you to avoid careless mistakes, which would cost you a lot of time in order to cut out these mistakes.
How to manage stress at the workplace?
Many employees consider stress as an essential part at their workplace that helps them to meet deadlines and increases their productivity. However, when stress becomes chronic it is important to take counter-measures.
Time Management:
Time management is an essential skill when it comes to the ability to reduce stress. In fact: improper time management can be one of the main reasons that cause stress, as we might not be able to meet deadlines and can’t accomplish the targeted tasks and goals.
In our corporate world we are facing workload and time limitations nearly every day, which makes it essential to apply effective time management techniques.
Physical activity
Physical activity and regular exercise can help you to relief stress in an effective way. Sport in general increases the productions of endorphins and decreases stress hormones. You do not necessarily need to join a gym or start running every morning; you can also make use of the stress relieving effect of physical activity at the workplace.
As a rule of thumb: keep your body moving! Instead of taking the elevator you could walk up the staircases, take a stroll during your lunch break or just stretch your body in a regular interval, which sitting on your office chair.
Organization
Start prioritizing your tasks from A – very important to C – unimportant and organize your tasks accordingly to their importance and urgency. If a task is very important and urgent you should focus your time and energy towards the accomplishment of this task, rather than a task that is important but not urgent at all. I would recommend you to invest five minutes before starting to work where you create a to-do-list with all your upcoming tasks and their prioritization.
Avoid a stressful lifestyle
When we seek for reasons that cause stress we mostly focus on our work environment that we often consider as the main source for stress. However, it can also be very helpful to reflect our lifestyle we are living and to seek for possible causes that increase our stress level, e.g.
sleep deprivation, drugs and our food habits. One such a cause could be an improper nutrition, with too much sugar, fat and caffeine. Caffeine is a part of nearly anyone’s breakfast, but it is also a stimulant that raises our level of activity and can make us very nervous, which is the foundation for stress.