Stressbusting at Work: 5 Tips

In a typical workspace, you’re likely to find people of various ideologies and personalities working together to meet a common goal. Not surprisingly, it could get a little messy at times. The one common thread amongst all is stress, which is inevitably prevalent in today’s office culture. Stress is a given with us humans, and it comes with a ton of additional negative effects tied to it. The most commonly reported mental effects are anxiety and depression. Stress can also cause physical symptoms like an increase in blood pressure, headaches, insomnia, and heart issues to name a few.

Most working adults report that their primary cause of stress is directly related to their work. Given these mental and physical effects of stress, it can also lower life expectancy according to a group of researchers from Harvard and Stanford University. The need to understand and deal with stress is higher than ever, so let’s take a look at five tips to effectively deal with stress.

1. Organize your work

It can get overwhelming at times when your backlog piles up right in front of you and tight deadlines begin looming over your head, which will make any person afraid of failure and procrastinate instead. To deal with this, you’ll need to:

• Break down your work into manageable chunks,
• Prioritize them, set deadlines, and
• Take them on one by one.

It is critical to avoid taking too much work at once. This can potentially hamper your efficiency by not letting you focus on individual tasks. It may also be a good idea to make your own personalized to-do list and write down the tasks, and write down the tasks in order of priority and strike them down as you go.

2. Eat Healthily

Stress can drive people to turn to unhealthy comfort food which is almost always rich in taste but terrible for health. Certain foods are known to help our bodies release dopamine in times of stress which makes us feel good and leaves us wanting more, and this is how people binge eat during stressful situations. Stress triggers the release of cortisol (also known as the stress hormone) in our bodies, which leaves us craving for good-tasting food. It is important to know that your diet hugely impacts your mental well-being while helping you de-stress easily. Foods rich in Omega-3 fatty acids like walnuts and salmon have mood-stabilizing properties which make them the best choice for office lunches, as well as fruits and antioxidant-rich dark chocolate. Office lunches don’t have to be a boring few minutes in the break room, but instead, you can snack on fruits and nuts throughout your workday which would provide you with enough nutrients and energy to keep you going stress-free.

3. Sleep Well

It is well established that sleep is an integral part of our overall well-being. A lack of good sleep usually leaves a person feeling groggy and disoriented throughout the day while hampering with your concentration, focus, mood and energy levels. We become susceptible to being more sensitive to the effects of stress and usually require significant energy to keep going.

• You should always aim to get at least 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every day to ensure optimum performance and high energy levels throughout the day.
• Naps also help a great deal when it comes to feeling well-rested and they can be snuck into your everyday work schedule as well.
• Power naps or simply meditating go a long way with helping cope with workplace stress. You can check more sleep tips and ideas at MyBestMattress.

4. Take some time off

Spending some time in a safe and fun environment away from your workspace could go a long way in your attempt at stressbusting. It usually helps to take some time off and relax with friends and not think about work, as it helps reduce the impact of how much the same stress could affect you. Currently, many companies are going for Coworking spaces where you have a lot to offer such as a calm, private, and stress-free work experience, in case you just want a change of pace.

5. Exercise

Physical activity is one of the most efficient stress busters out there. Nothing else can make your energy levels skyrocket like a run or a short workout session. Aerobic exercise is known to stimulate endorphin production which naturally boosts your mood and productivity, making you more efficient to get more work done. You could simply take a short walk every couple of hours to subtly increase your heart rate and just get some fresh air.

Work-related stress is, of course, a very prominent part of today’s work culture. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to tackle the problems associated with it, but they all come down to some of the simple changes that you can make in your work-style that would make all the difference.