Stress is not always negative. It can be a positive thing that helps us stay focused on current work, problems, or issues. It also helps us in being productive and to grow in our life. Getting stressed at work for some short periods might not be an issue. But when we are at work, we have to deal with the challenging and volatile environment with capricious variables and factors that force us to perform our duties and get the job done before the deadline. All the workload, emails, phone calls, and impromptu meetings are a perfect recipe for the continuous stress that will turn into anxiety.
The extended stress at work decreases your productivity, and it destroys your work-life balance. It hurts your emotions, and you feel everything slipping out of your hands, including life itself. According to researchers, more than 30 to 40 % of workers in the organizations score at higher stress levels in the survey.
The good thing is that you can manage stress by doing these easy to perform activities. You can manage workload stress and reclaim your life from the agonizing deadlines, pending stressors, and anxiety brewing factors at work.
Let’s start the lifesaving activities that will help you get back to work-life balance and get maximum out of your abilities and physical and mental resources.
1. Start it Right
Contrary to the normal belief, stress doesn’t start when you reach the office. Rather it starts when you wake up in the morning and think of everything you have to perform before reaching the office and all sorts of deadlines and pending tasks. This is not a productive way to start the day.
You must plan the activities and assign them ample time. Get up in the morning before time and focus only on the task at hand. Make a healthy breakfast, feed your children well, drop them school, and try to reach the office a few minutes before starting time. Never let things slip out of your hands at the very beginning of the day. When you have started a good day with a healthy meal and completed all of your responsibilities with a positive attitude, now the work stress will not suck your energy, and you will be able to perform far better than the days before.
2. Be Clear
When you have reached the office and started looking for the tasks you have to complete today and all the deadlines to meet in the days to come, you need something more. If you have a single project or there are different activities you have to perform, the most important thing you must get is clarity. You must be clear about the task as what it requires from you. What are the demands of your supervisor, team leader, boss, or manager regarding those tasks.
If you have a clear idea about the tasks and results needed, it will become easy for you to manage all the resources and abilities to get the work done most effectively and efficiently. When you don’t know about the requirement and roles you have to play, you will get stressed, your productivity will decrease, and you will be the one who will suffer the most emotionally and mentally. Clear your responsibilities and requirements with the supervisor, and communication will relieve the stress from both of you.
3. Have Work-Life Balance
You cannot relieve yourself of stress if you don’t do this particular step in your life. You have a life outside the office (or your computer if you are working from home.) And this life requires your proper involvement with all of your intentions, resources, and capabilities. When you are so much indulging in work outside the workplace, this signifies that your work is consuming you, and you are not living a life.
The secret behind living a life full of accomplishments and happiness is to give due time to everything you do. And create a work-life balance that will let you achieve higher in your career and have a happy and healthy life that will keep you motivated to do more work and enjoy every minute of your life to the fullest for a fulfilled life.
4. Say No to Conflict
Conflict at work will continuously keep eating your energy and your positive side and leave you with negativity, slackness, and procrastination. Never share more information with others regarding religion or politics in the office or the country. Stay away from the negative people. Whenever things start going out of hand, use proper communication and get everything back to normal.
But if you had to come face to face with conflict with the co-workers, focus on making things better, try to forgive more, and let everyone know that you are not a punching bag for others to make their catharsis on you. You will do your best to stay out of conflict and live a positive life no matter the situation.
5. Stay Organized
If you are suffering from stress at work, try to be organized and make everything do good as you planned it. Work on factors and variables that you will suffer in the future regarding the task at hand. Try to organize all the things in the present to get things done in time and meet deadlines by staying calm and fresh.
When things are scattered even at your desk, you will remain under stress all the time. Try to reach the office before time and avoid being the first one to leave the office. Take your time in everything you do and perform every activity in a well-planned manner.
6. Be Comfortable
Even if you are doing everything right, meeting all the deadlines, and doing great in work but you are still under stress. You must look for the environment in which you are and the place you do your job. Most of the time, the annoying factors around us keep us under stress all the time.
The most important thing to make you uncomfortable is your chair or the location of the desk. The factors like these make you uncomfortable, and this feeling will keep you stressed out all day, and the result will be compromised productivity and inability to meet deadlines. Always get a comfortable chair, keep your desk clean and stay comfortable to avoid stress and work happily.
7. Don’t Even Think About Multitasking
You will get nothing by splitting your focus. When you are doing a job, you must provide accuracy and preciseness in everything you do and every operation you perform. It is scientifically proven that your accuracy and preciseness suffer when you do multi-tasking, and you get slow and make mistakes, even doing petty things.
Avoid the idea of multitasking. Always focus on one thing at hand. When you have more tasks that you have to do on the same day, pick one of them, exert all of your efforts on that activity, and do the work right. After completing the first task, start focus on the second and completed them all one by one. You will get mistake-free results, and the work will be done before the time you would have thought while multitasking.
8. Walk to Lunch
When scientists at NASA reach a dead-end or get stuck to a problem, they increase their exercise and start doing extreme physical exercises. This helps them get out of the stress and look at the problem from a new perspective. This new perspective helps them solve the problem, and they get the solution to the impossible.
You can also benefit from this habit and make a habit of doing a walk to go to lunch. But if your work hours and schedule don’t allow you to do so, you can have strolls in the office to keep you out of stress and stay focused on your abilities and do everything with a new zest in the office. And create perfect harmony in your work-life balance.
9. Perfectionism Will Do no Good
Make this your motto in life. If you want to be a high achiever, it is a positive attitude that will make you accomplish more in life. But when you try to be a perfectionist, you are not making things difficult for you, but the people around you will also have to suffer because of this madness.
When you want to get results, always try to achieve 100%. But doing everything perfectly will do you no good, and you will exert all of your energies in taking care of petty things, and these tiny issue will exhaust all of your energy. Perfectionism will take all the good out of you in the petty things, and at the end of the day, you will not be able to meet the deadline and achieve your goals.
10. Listen to the Music
This might not seem much to you, but when you listen to the music coming to the office or way back home while driving, you get all the stress out of your head and start making feel alive once again. Music tends to heal your brain, and it can help you focus on being alive and enjoy your existence.
When you play an uplifting song in the morning, you might have noticed that suddenly everything starts making sense, and you love to move your limbs and enjoy the most obnoxious routines of your life. The soothing music while driving back home will wash out all the workload and stress from the office, and you will feel new to have a healthy, fun time with your family.
11. Know Thyself
When you are not aware of your abilities, traits, and qualities, you unintentionally try to compare yourself with people who have a completely different set of attributes than you. When you try to compete with someone who has things you don’t have, the result will be failure and despair.
Always try to realize your unique set of abilities and perform the task according to your way. When you try to perform the assigned task and activities in the way you understand, the results become more prominent. And you start to shine in the workplace, which relieves the work stress and makes you feel accomplished and fulfilled in your work.
12. Dedication to Work
When you take the work assigned to you as a load to perform and please the boss to get paid at the end of the month, it will give you nothing but stress. But when you are trying to be a responsible person who tries to do what is right and performs the duties to meet the deadlines he or she has accepted to fulfill will get the work done beautifully without getting stressed out.
The workload can make you feel agitated about everything in the office and at home. But when your work is the task you have accepted. And you deploy your abilities with full dedication to the work you get the work done, and your productivity reaches a whole new level.
13. Organization
The files scattered at the desk and working on more than one assignment with everything scattered around on the desk and in your mind will make you feel more stressed out than the load of the work itself. Without the organization of your tasks, abilities, and resources, you cannot get the work done in the required time.
Try to manage everything in your life in an organized way. This will not only help you focus your resources on the important and essential things at hand. It will also make you see your performance and the rate in real-time. So you can make yourself clear of your performance, and it will let you perform more as you usually used to do before.
14. Delegation
When you are a team player, delegation is not the right approach you could do to get things done most effectively and efficiently. But as a manager or a team leader, your life becomes easy when you start delegating the work to the right people.
Try to read and learn about delegation and look for the right kinds of people you have in your team. Delegate the tasks and responsibilities to these key players and get the stress away from your shoulders and focus on more productive activities that will increase your team’s growth and results.
Delegation doesn’t mean assigning the task and focusing on the person and working with them on every step and transition. On the other hand, it means finding the right person for the task and assigning them the responsibility to perform the task before the deadline. You must make milestones and check the person’s performance and get the work done before the deadline while focusing your abilities on the most productive and useful tasks for the betterment of the team and organization.
15. Meditation
The stress decompression chamber is not that expensive or difficult to make. You can get into that chamber daily for 20 to 30 minutes and get out of stress no matter how much workload you have on your shoulder. Meditation, regardless of the type or kind, allows you to do so daily.
Meditation allows you to focus on the life force in you. It will make you throw away all the unnecessary stress you have been carrying on your mind to get the work done. It tends to increase your productivity and performance. Any kind of regular meditation is scientifically proven to provide you with relief and comfort, help you regulate the blood pressure, and calm the nerves for a better life at work and home.
16. Time Management
Make a schedule and stick to it is the perfect recipe to make yourself away from the work’s stress. Make a to-do list or write down your timetable to get the things done most effectively and efficiently. The schedule will help you stay focused, and you will be able to perform the long-term processes and operation s divided into short-term time-oriented tasks.
Time management will help you achieve a higher level of performance in your work life. And your social and domestic life will also get great benefits from this habit. When you do everything before the deadline, you would feel more accomplished, and a person doing things right will automatically stay away from the stress and anxiety.
17. Positive Attitude
When you think that everything in this universe is working to make you fail in your life, then everything will start doing its toll to let you down. This is not a scientific statement. Rather it is a perspective confirmed by both big achievers and failures. But both have different perspectives on this approach.
The person who takes this statement as reality will not get more out of life, and he will suffer throughout the life no matter what the results are. But the person who is focused on achieving things in life will negate this statement and say that when you strive to get accomplished, everything around you helps you achieve more.
The real difference is your approach. When you take things lightly and try to make some reason out of the setbacks and failure, you get new energy to perform more and reclaim your life achievements. A positive attitude is referred to as a winning attitude as it gives you more out of everything you do.
18. Sleep Well
A good sleep at night will make you wake up full of energy in the morning without the previous day’s burden. If you don’t sleep well at night, it will make you feel stressed out the whole day until the next night comes. Then starts the vicious circle of deprivation which will lead to failure, despair, and emotional imbalance.
Employees cannot risk being sleep deprived as it will affect their productivity and decision-making power. The main reason for being under stress is staying deprived of 6 to 8 hours of sleep at night. If you are a workaholic, try to maintain a balance between life and work. Your body heals itself when you have a sound sleep, and without the full stretch of sleep at night, the healing process won’t complete, and you will feel the physical and mental changes in your body and continues stress on your mind regarding everything around you.
19. Stay Out of Fear
This might not seem a biggie initially, but when you have developed a habit of being fearful regarding your task completion and meeting deadlines, you have brewed the perfect material to snatch your life from you. The fear will keep you under stress all the time, and it will lead to anxiety disorder and various painful issues in your professional and emotional life.
Always try to take control of variables and factors which must be under your control don’t freak out on everything. No matter what happens, you should not let go of your cool. Fear consumes you badly and lefts you nothing with emptiness and deprivation. Make a habit of taking responsibility and doing your best to fulfill the requirements and complete the task without thinking that you are not going to do it before time. Because if you keep thinking about negative things, you will not have much time to act and achieve.
20. Avoid procrastination
The perfect thing to get you under stress for some substantial time is to procrastinate the necessary things in your life. It doesn’t matter that you work well and follow schedules on work or a procrastinator in your life outside the office. Procrastination will have its toll, and you will have to suffer on its behalf.
The habit of procrastination will make a pile of important things right before the project’s deadline or assignment. You will have many different things to do that will snatch your focus and productivity, and meet the deadline will become impossible. Sooner or later, every procrastinator has to suffer because of this reason, and the result is stress and low productivity level. Change this habit by making a to-do list or schedule of activities and perform them in due time you have assigned.
21. Plan Ahead
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. This is the most important lesson that management gurus keep telling you to increase your productivity and achieve your goals. You must have to incorporate this mantra in your mind and plan ahead of the events and activities.
You must make things streamlined and connect things by focusing on variables and strategies to perform the desired tasks without compromising your effectiveness. A well-planned track will keep you away from procrastination, negativity, and fear of losing. This plan will show you your progress through milestones, and these little achievements will keep you motivated to apply the whole plan and grapple with all the contingencies and get things done most productively.
22. Have a Hobby
A hobby is not an activity that keeps you busy for some time when you are free or at home. Rather it is an activity that keeps all the burden of work and stress of life away from your mind to keep you connected to life and lie the present moment. When you focus on your work and goal, you are trying to live in the future, which is technically impossible as you can only stay and live in the present.
The hobby is an activity that lets you stay in the present and stay connected to life and have fun by doing activities that make you happy and relieve all the burden from your shoulders. Singing, gardening, sports, exercise, your hobby could be any activity that brings a smile on your face, and you heave a sigh of comfort while and after doing the activity. Get a hobby and get a big gulp of life every single day to stay alive and kicking.
23. Help someone
Association for Psychological Science revealed research that when you help some colleague, friend, or even give a helping hand to a stranger in any way, the daily stress level on your mind decreases dramatically. There are various reasons for this fact, but the most beautiful one is that when you help someone achieve something, you are motivating yourself from the inside that everything can be done; life is not hard.
The achievement of helping someone is enough to keep you motivated and stay out of stress. You can find many colleagues and friends in trouble of not knowing how to perform a particular activity. You can help your colleagues and team players to perform particular activities and operations in the office in your free time. This habit of yours will earn you a good name, and you will shine in the eyes of management; it will also increase your comfort level in the workplace. The more you help others, the more innovative and out-of-the-box solutions your mind gives you to solve your issues and problem. Staying out of stress is the bonus that comes with a lot of perks through helping someone.
24. Listen to Your Breath
It is a simple remedy to get out of extreme stress by doing this simple trick in your office chair or anywhere you are. Listen to your breathing, and changing your breathing rhythm will get you out of the higher stress level regardless of the load on your shoulders and issue in hand.
You don’t need to go anywhere to do this trick. Be seated on your chair, close your eyes and focus on listening to the sound of breathing. When you listen to your breath and change the breathing pattern, your focus diverts from the negativity and fear to the sound of life you are inhaling through your nostrils. This sound will help you inhale more oxygen, and when your mind is free from the negative impact of stress, all the oxygen will be utilized, and you will get the power to perform the impossible.
If you are out in the open with a lot of noise around you, trying to inhale air with a rush will let you achieve the results and get the work done most innovatively, and stress will be gone in a minute or two. Doing it before your first presentation or going into the interview room always give miraculous results.
25. Be grateful
It is not just a religious thing to be grateful for what you have. It is also a scientific fact that people who have gratitude and are grateful for what life has given them always stay away from the stress. When you are grateful to life and focusing on your haves, your mind stays diverted from have-nots.
Gratitude will makes you the person you always wanted to be. It makes you polite, comfortable, and focused on doing the right things. This healthy attitude will make you feel connected to life, and you get power from inside to repel the negative thought and stay away from stress even in the presence of the stressors.
26. Avoid Self-Imposed Stress
This one is the most crucial while earning how to manage stress at work. Most of the time, we are imposing stress on ourselves for the things that can be taken lightly. If someone is not stressing anything about a particular thing and you keep telling yourself that you must do it perfectly, this act will make you freak out, and the stress level will soar to ever high.
Not everything in your life needs the stress and ultimate focus of all of your resources. When you are doing a job, you are good at many things, and without getting into shallow water, you can perform these activities like a breeze. Plan ahead, stay organized and let things flow naturally and play your part with devotion and gratitude, and everything will do great at the end of the day.
Over to you
We have discussed the best activities that have provided the proven results and changed the lives of the employees in big and small organizations regardless of the workers’ stress load and emotional condition. These activities let the workers realize that everything is not out of their control. With the help of the right amount of focus and performing useful tricks, all the stress at the workplace can be handled and managed to keep it to the minimum level so it will not overshadow the person’s abilities.
You can use one or more activities and infuse them into your daily work routine to keep your mind fresh and healthy to get the work done without hurting yourself from taking the stress of the duties and responsibilities.
