How to Deal with Stress and Get Back to Work!

7 Comments read more
bio

I’m Harsh Agrawal

Blog Scientist & a passionate blogger. Love minimalist life & talk about things that matter. Adventure from heart & doer by action.

read more

One of the worst things about being under stress is that it decreases your efficiency and productivity, and it has a negative effect on your overall performance.

Like you, I get stressed for various reasons. Sometimes my stress is work-related, sometimes it’s related to personal issues, and at times it can be related to disturbing news of something of this nature. No matter the cause, one thing which I know for sure is that stress is a facet of my own mind, and only I can deal with it. I also know that if I don’t take control of my stress level, my work will suffer – and that is not an option.

stress management

Before I learned to take control of my stress issues, I used to spend a lot of time attempting to avoid them by playing games on my phone, watching movies, or spending the entire day in bed!  The trouble is that when we’re idle we tend to constantly think about the things which are causing our stress which only increases the stress! This in turn hampers the decision-making process and it also serves to kill a day of our precious lives.

So let’s look at a few more reasonable ways of dealing with stress:

 

A few solutions for dealing with stress:

These tips work for me, however they may or may not work for you. You need to find what works best for you and employ those strategies for dealing with life’s stress regularly.

Make a to-do list and work on it:

Most of the time when I deal with stress it is because I’m burned out or stressed out due to work related issues. If I’m working constantly for a few weeks without taking a break, it makes me feel like an alien, and also I feel lonely (a very common issue when working from home).

When I am stressed due to work overload, I make an actionable to-do list. I already use the Wunderlist app to manage my day-to-day tasks, but in this case I divide paper into small pieces, write work tasks which need to be completed urgently, and I throw the paper away when the task is finished.  As soon as I see the number of papers in front of me decreasing, I not only feel generally encouraged, but it also gives me the confidence to finish the remaining tasks.

One of the worst things we can do when we are stressed is to not take action.  It is better to tackle whatever is causing the stress head-on and move toward resolving that stress immediately.  You will be amazed by how much time you can save and how much you can accomplish by not allowing yourself to fall into the zone of the stressful mind.

Meet a friend:

Go out and meet with friends who respect you, trust you, and appreciate you for who you are. This will help to motivate you, and if you are spending time with people who love and appreciate you, you will begin to see yourself from their perspective and you will naturally feel better about yourself as a result.

A change of work environment:

If you are working from home, burnout is very common. Often when we have no one around with whom to talk about work issues, we end up fighting with our own thoughts.

Another “danger” of working from home on your own is the tendency to allow ourselves to become distracted by browsing Facebook and other social sites.  Not only is this  great time-waster, but when we’re inundated with photos of people traveling and living their “wonderful” lives, we can sometimes feel even more miserable.

Go out of your home domain, find a nice place to sit, and work from there for a while. Being in Delhi, I enjoy the cafes at Hauz Khas Village. They have free wifi and the crowd there is awesome.

Seeing enthusiasm in other people can be very helpful to your own enthusiasm for life.

(If you happen to be based in South Delhi, I highly recommend any of the cafes there.)

Forget work for a while and focus on leisure activities:

Even if you are a workaholic, there are many other things that you can enjoy doing. Go ahead and take some time to do some of these things. Be it a sport, a movie or anything else –  change is requisite. While it is not good to allow your leisure activities to consume your life and diminish your work productivity, it is very important to make time for things we enjoy doing that are not in any way related to our work.  So when you’re feeling stressed, take a nice break of a few hours, and then get back in your work suit.

Analyze your past stress:

Consider how you have dealt with larger stress issues in the past, and how you were able to break away from the chains of that stress. Flash back and do whatever worked for you in the past!

There are people who become highly unmotivated when they are under stress, and then there are people like you who read about these issues on blogs like mine in an effort to find ways to fight the stress. Since you fall into the second category, you are likely to come away from your stressful dealings stronger and more capable.

This brings to mind the following quote: “Pain takes weakness away from you.”  Likewise, once you know how to battle your personal stress, you will emerge as a stronger person.

Do feel free to share with us your secret recipe for fighting stress. How do you deal with stress, and what are the tips you have to offer to others?

 

7 comments on “How to Deal with Stress and Get Back to Work!

  1. Yes STRESS is common when we work from home. We keep fighting with our thoughts. When we try to FOCUS on one thing we end up working on something else. My problem is that I love to work less but the smart way, so I start working and end up working a lot. Being a blogger I usually work more than 8 hrs a day then get exhausted and takes a break for another day.
    Things that I do when I stressed are –
    1. Playing the games,
    2. Watching motivational movie.
    3. Going out with my beautiful wife and visiting malls, cafes etc
    4. Most of time we do shopping. (Shopping really entertains me, I don’t know why but I get relieved when I spend money)
    5. I read magazines and books

    1. @Aniruddha
      That’s true…but meditation works great when you are in practice.. Specially for first-timer it’s not going to be very helpful. Saying that, it’s a good idea to do those things which put you back in energy mode.

  2. I completely understand the woes of having to work in a home office, and how quickly irritation and stress can get to you.

    I occasionally step away from my laptop for a 10 minute break after every 45 minutes or 1 hour. I play a sport or atleast go for a jog and completely block my mind from thinking about work and anything related to it.

    Towards the end of the day I try working out a To-Do list so that the next day doesn’t end up becoming a stressful start

  3. I also have stress.. being working women in office… after work small things what my kids do relieves me from stress and playing & studying with them is good relaxation…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *