Sometimes things don't go right.
Sometimes you make mistakes.
Sometimes the situation isn't always roses and daisies. And that's okay.
The real solution to having less stress at work and to feeling so blah and stressed down all the time about wor is...
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Are you feeling stressed AF at work?
If you are, this Articles is exactly for you. I'm making just for you. My friend stress at work is totally normal. We all have it, it is something that always exists. But especially right now with everything going on in the world, all of our stress might be feeling a little bit more elevated.
I wanted to share with you some simple strategies on how you can handle stress at work. And in life. My most important strategy is going to be the last one that we talk about. So make sure that you stay all the way through.
If you're ready to learn my stress relief tips so that you can have less stress at work.
The first Tips to Stop Stressing About Work that I have for you to handle stress at work is to breathe. I know this sounds really dumb because it's really obvious. Like, you're breathing right now I bet. I hope you are!
The power of breathing is that simply taking a really nice deep breath can be something that helps move you from a reactive state where positive things don't always happen into a more active state where you can react accordingly. And with less stress, if we look into the science behind it, there's a couple of different things at play.
First of all, if you're facing acute stress, which I'm going to come back to in just a minute, you are going to be having an amygdala response. That's your fight flight or freeze. It's the most primitive area of our brain from when we were cavemen and we were facing challenges like saber toothed tigers. Now, you probably won't find many of those lurking around at work. However, your reaction to any stress of work is essentially the same.
Taking time to breathe is actually going to allow the chemical in your brain that actually unaccept amygdala response time to dissipate so that you can move into your logic center of your brain.
The other component is our brain just needs oxygen, especially if we are going to be doing some deep thinking. We want to be thoughtful in our actions, especially if we are in a very stressful situation, we are going to be able to think better and act better when we have that oxygen for our brain.
So really, breathing is always your friend on a day to day basis. But especially in times of stress, know when you are taking that moment to breathe, one of the things that I want you to be asking yourself is moving into my second tip to handle stress at work. And that is getting to the root of the problem.
The question I want you to sincerely think about an answer for yourself here is: What is the real problem here ? The thing that we're feeling stressed about and maybe feeling anxious, or reactive or having conflict about might not actually be the source of the problem, it might just be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Or it might be the thing that's in front of us that we can actually identify. For example, one of the ways that I've seen this play out with my clients in the real world is having a lot of stress about inbox management.
They're being bombarded in their inbox with action items and things to do. And they have to reply to this and do this and think about that. So yeah, it's their inbox stressing them out. But what is actually underlying that stress is that they don't feel like they're in control. If this sounds a little bit familiar drop.
One of the things that I think especially when I work one on one with my clients that always surprises people is that they're usually coming because there is a problem, there is an obstacle, but it's often deeper than what we actually think it is. So in till we get to the point where we really understand the problem, we're not going to be able to solve for it. And that means that we're going to have stress, we resolve that thing, we are going to feel that stress in a different way.
Now this one I know it's a lot easier said than done. But I promise you that investing time into this step is going to be something that is really helpful.
For my next Tips to Stop stress About work, I want to come back to something that I mentioned earlier, which was talking about acute stress. And that is that you need to consider perspective. And there's a couple of layers to this. So let's dive into it.
There's two questions that I have for you, to help you gain perspective about your stress at work. The first is, is the stress about thing. So often when we're talking about stress, it's a bad thing. And we're talking about all the negative impacts of stress. And you know, we feel so stressed down and as soon as someone says that they're stressed, we automatically know that that's a bad thing.
But the thing is that stress can be a good thing. If we actually look at it from the psychology behind stress. There are three different types of stress. One is good, two or bad. The first kind of stress is you stress, this is good stress.
This is the stress that is motivating us. So sometimes if we're thinking about our stress, and maybe we are feeling a little bit insecure or we're facing a little bit of imposter syndrome on a project that we're Working on the thing is that this isn't always a bad thing, this stress can actually really motivate us to invest our attention, our energy and our best effort to accomplish the outcome that we're really going for.
And with all this good stress, we might not actually come into it with the gousto, that we're coming with it now that we're quite honestly a little bit terrified that we're in over our heads.
On the other hand, we have the bad stressors, we have acute stress, and this is actually triggered by an event. So think about, you get a call from an unhappy customer, or unclear instructions from your boss, and there is a tight deadline to meet it. And you're not sure what you're even supposed to be doing.
These are acute stressors, they're kind of sudden and instantaneous, then we also have chronic stress. And there are different types of chronic stress that you might experience at work.
One great example. Chronic stress is the stress that is always present. For example, if you have a toxic manager, that stress of having them is constant, even though there is going to be also acute stressors, which they bring into your world.
Now one thing that can be interesting, and it's not true in all cases, but I want you to be open about it. And I want you to consider it for those bad stressors that you have in your life. Sometimes our bad stressors might actually be a good stressor in disguise.
Like maybe that bad Boss that we're dealing with is really giving us the motivation, when we kind of are stuck in our careers to take that next step to either get the promotion or our dream job. And let's just face it, anytime that we have the opportunity in life to take lemons and make a delicious lemon teeny, we need to drink that shit up.
The other question that I have regarding perspective for you is, does this really matter? And be honest with yourself your if you come back to this stressful situation in a year? Are you really gonna care about it?
I think in our day to day jobs, we just get so entrenched in the things that we're doing. And we end up getting really stressed over benign things. Because of course, all of the little things add up to the really big things. But in the sequence of events, is this something that is going to really, truly have impact on your career and in your life? If the answer is yes, then yeah, it's pretty much a valid stressor.
But if it's something that a year from now isn't really going to matter, then maybe you can stress out a little bit less about it. And this brings me into my next tip to handle stress at work. And that is to regain control.
Especially if you're a control freak like me, one of the easiest ways to fuel an enormous amount of stress is to not be in control of a situation. In my opinion, if you are not in control, you are in chaos. And when you're in chaos, things start to take out through your life, this doesn't mean that things are completely off the hook and that you're reckless and things like that.
Really chaos just means that you aren't in control of your actual day. And the things that are happening because this means that you can't be sure you can be confident that you're going to achieve your career goals. or even your to do list today, when you have a stress at work.
Ask yourself this question, what can I control? And this is no way insinuating that you have control over all of the things you really don't you're dealing with other people unless you work all by yourself, and then you're just stressing yourself out.
But that's probably not the situation, you're probably dealing with your boss, with coworkers, with other teams, with customers with partners. But in this stressfull situation, which is causing us stress at work, what are you actually in control of if the stress is more aggregate I didn't, because of a lot of things, one of the things that I do encourage you to consider is establishing some work life boundaries if you haven't already done so.
Because when we think about things like dealing with difficult coworkers and your inbox taking over your life, or you feel like you're working all of the time, and that's the thing that's causing you stress at work, this is something that can be fixed for it.
Now, when we think about the chronic stressors, like the nonstop email notifications, work taking over your life, dealing with toxic co workers are their work life boundaries that you can set that will help alleviate them. And then of course, in a more acute situation, think about the things that you are actually in control of.
When you have a stressful situation at work, there is going to be a ton of stuff that isn't in your control, that it's totally up to other people who they decide to be what they do in this situation.
But you can always control the things that you are in control of this includes your energy, your effort, your workplace boundaries, all of these things really add up. And when you're clear on what you can control, it actually helps you release the stress and worry an anxiety about all of the things that you aren't in control of that are stressing you out at work.
Next point Tips to Stop Stressing About Work, And this is one of the things that if you're trying to handle stress at work, i t's a step that seems really obvious. But so many people miss this one. And that is to do a priority check. I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to a client that is just stressing themselves and running them into the ground over something really tiny.
That either wasn't something that was the most important thing, or didn't really have a huge impact. When we don't understand how things are prioritized at our company, on our team. And for ourselves, it's really easy to enter a state of overwhelm, because then you just have all of this stuff to do.
That creates a lot of stress at work. However, when you know exactly what you should be focusing on the impact that you are supposed to be having and how you can best have an impact at work.
This allows you to focus on all of those things. It also makes you feel a lot better about the things that you don't need to stress out about because you don't really maybe even need to do or at least don't need to do right now.
This is honestly one of the things that knowing your unique awesomeness quotient, your UAQ has a huge impact on, if you don't already know your UAQ, if you cannot escape stress at work, why not just stress over the right things that are actually going to move your career forward and are going to bring you satisfaction in your career.
If you want to cope with stress at work, I highly recommend that you find a way to get some exercise in, now this isn't all about like doing some like crazy high intensity hit training, or you know getting really ripped or anything like that. Not at all unless that's your thing.
Because when I'm talking about exercise here, it's not about looking hot. And it's not even necessarily about all of the health benefits that exercise actually offers you, it's because exercise is actually going to give you three immediate benefits.
First of all, when you exercise when you move your body, you are going to decrease your levels of stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol.
The second immediate impact that exercise has is that if you change your scenery, it changes your mind, especially if you're facing a different work problem. Something as simple as going for a walk and just seeing different things. And getting some clarity is going to be what actually gets you through that stress at work, or just makes you feel a little bit better so that you can tackle it when you get back to the office or to your home office.
And the third isn't necessary. But most of the time when I talk about exercise and something like going for a walk or going for a good run if you're me. And this is something that just getting outside and breathing in, you know, nice, clean air, hopefully it's clean air unless you're in New York City like me which case it's you know, massive minnows.
But nonetheless, getting outside especially into that nice, cold crisp fall air that we have right now is pointing me something that feels really, really good and decreases your stress levels.
This is something that especially like for me in terms of stress management, the best way that I am managing my stress throughout my career has been through exercise.
And once you have that habit, it becomes the first thing that you do. And if you're going to go to any vice, in a stressful situation, exercise is a lot better than a lot of the other vices that we might have like getting back to something a little bit more traditional and less sweaty, is my next tip to help you handle stress. And that is to commit to either your next step or to change if your work stress is because you were absolutely miserable your job you hate your company or in a toxic workplace, then you need to commit to actually changing that situation.
And then you commit to your next step. Or if you're more into a scenario of acute stress, just identifying what you are going to do next, or what you can learn from the situation is going to be something that is immensely immensely helpful.
I think it's really easy when we're feeling stressed out at work to just kind of stay in that place. I know it sounds really ridiculous. But doing nothing is a lot easier than doing something even. And probably even especially if you're feeling kind of miserable because of the stress that you have at work.
I'm sure when you actually start actioning those changes or taking those steps, you're going to feel a lot better and your stress level is going to alleviate especially as you get closer to resolving the actual cause of stress at work.
And this brings me into my last Tips to Stop Stressing About Work. And that was to stop being so hard on yourself. So many of my clients that I know so many of you are just your perfectionist at heart and I know because and I know how hard it is when you just want to be your best, bring your best, and really succeed in every single situation.
But you know what, sometimes things don't go right. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes the situation is isn't always roses and daisies, and that's okay.
The real solution to having less stress at work and to feeling so blah and stress d out all the time about work is to actually tak some of the pressure off of yourself. And whe you're ambitious, and when you're tenacious, this is so much easier said than done.
Trust me on thi one. But the easier that you can go in yoursel and really seeing that your career success journe is a marathon. It's not a sprint. It makes a lot of stressful situations that you're facing at wor or career obstacles that you're trying to navigate so much easier.
And I think one of the ways tha we can really do this is to make sure that we ar cultivating a positive attitude, because whe things don't go your way, and especially if you'r a perfectionist by nature, just like me, it' really easy to feel defeated when things don't g right or don't go the way that you're expectin them to go.
However, when you cultivate tha positive mindset, it allows you to see th opportunity in every situation, which i ultimately going to be something that elevate your career.
