How to reduce stress from work?

Is it possible to accomplish everything that has to be accomplished during the day, to rush from one part of the city to another, to work all night in order to finish the presentation for the meeting at 9 am the next morning or write an urgent reply to a client’s email while your kid is trying to climb onto your head (supposing that you work from home, like I do) –all of that without feeling overwhelmed? Of course, you already know that my answer is yes, even if you are not convinced that I’m right. So, today, I’m going to tell you how to reduce stress from work and to give you some simple and effective tips that you can put into practice right away.

But first of all, what is the stress anyway (if you want to beat your enemy, you have to know it well). First of all, stress is something that you create. But even if it exists only in your head and can’t have an existence outside of your body, we can’t say it isn’t real. It is real, you can feel it! But if you fully understand and accept the fact that it can’t exist outside of you, it means that you can control it. So even if you may say that the stress is provoked by external factors (too much work for example), the truth is that those external factors don’t create stress, you do! The good news is – if you can create it, you can also eliminate it.

Now that we have defined stress, we are going to see how we can deal with it.

“Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing at all and is far more unpleasant.” Andy Shaw

Today we are constantly being bombarded with so many information, and something tells me that this is not going to change anytime soon. On the contrary, it may get even worse. So, as the world isn’t going to change, you must change yourself!

Being present

The solution is in fact very, very simple and can be resumed in one sentence – IF YOU WANT TO ELIMINATE STRESS YOU HAVE TO BE PRESENT.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed with stress, slow down or simply stop. Stop doing that urgent thing that must be done before noon and breath for a moment. If you have a possibility, go outside just for 5 minutes. If it is not possible or it is too complicated, simply open the window. Find a piece of nature, a tree, a bird, a flower, or, if everything around you is gray, look at the sky. Feel the fresh air caressing your face, close your eyes if you feel like it, and concentrate on your breath. As soon as you become present, the stress will dissolve naturally. This will take only 5 minutes of your time, and when you go back to your work, you’ll be relaxed and ten times more efficient than before. I’m speaking from my personal experience. Six years ago, I worked in a big international company based in Paris, as a personal assistant to the CEO. Needless to say that at that time stressful situations were a part of my everyday life. Every time I felt too overwhelmed, I used to close the door of my office, open the window and look at the sky for a while, enjoying the moment of peace. I can say without exaggeration that these moments literally saved my mental health. When you are present everything becomes relative, and you can clearly make a difference between important and unimportant things in life, so why bother with unimportant things such as the general meeting of shareholders, when the life outside is so beautiful.

Another thing that I would like to point out is that activity doesn’t necessarily mean productivity. Have you ever heard of the 80/20 Rule? I will write about it some other time, but it means that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs. This makes me think of another personal experience. It was late in the evening, midnight or so, I was working on a new website and had to install a program that I had never used before. I won’t go into details because it’s not interesting for this story but I really wanted to finish the technical part of that work that night, in order to be able to concentrate on more interesting stuff in the morning. The installation went well but when I wanted to activate it, there was an error. I repeated all the steps from the tutorial several times trying to detect my mistake, but there wasn’t any, I did everything right, and it still didn’t work. So I was stuck. I started to look for the solution on forums, to read all kind of uninteresting technical blog posts, trying to figure out how to resolve my problem, but I felt that I just was going around in circles. As the time passed, I was more and more tired and stressed out, but as I can be very stubborn sometimes, I told myself that I won’t go to bed until I find the solution to my problem. Around 4 am it became obvious to me that I was simply losing my time and that I won’t get anywhere like this, so I resigned to go to bed not without a strong feeling of frustration and disappointment. Every night when I go to bed, I meditate for a while. Either I listen to a guided meditation or if I’m too tired, I just relax and breathe and express my gratitude for the past day and for all the good things in my life in general. When I finished my meditation, I smiled and told myself that I was so ridiculous because I stayed up all night for nothing, but this time the feeling of frustration was gone and I felt that the solution was there and that I have nothing to worry about. And when I closed my eyes, just before I fell asleep, the light bulb in my head finally switched on and I asked myself the following question: Do you really need that program? I was really very tired so I decided to think about it in the morning. The answer to my question was obviously: no. There was another way to do what I had to do on my website without that program. And I found out how to do it simply by typing a question in the Google search bar. It was done in 10 minutes. If I had stopped just for 5 minutes last night, I wouldn’t have lost 4 hours. So the moral of my story is: if you ever feel stuck in your work and it seems that there is no solution, don’t rush, slow down, make a short break. The solution is already there but you have to allow it to come to you by being present.

Creating positive vibrations

Another thing that you can do is to create positive vibrations almost instantly by using a very simple technique – 15 seconds of positive thought. All you have to do is think of something nice for about 15 seconds (without interruption of any negative thought). It can be just anything: playing with your kids, that great party you went to last weekend, the girl you met on the bus, all the great things you accomplished by now. Thinking about a positive event or situation will create positive feeling instantly and raise your vibration. Then go back to your task. You will notice that when you change your state of mind, all of a sudden, everything become much easier.

To give you an example, I create positive vibrations whenever I want to, thinking about one of the best moments in my life. Seven years ago, I decided to spend my spring holiday on the Greek island of Corfu with my dad. This is something I had always wanted to do for so many reasons. My dad traveled from Belgrade and I joined him from Paris a day later, we haven’t seen each other for months. The moment when I opened the heavy gate of the Villa Artemis and saw my father walking across a wonderful garden full of flowers and magnificent palm trees, with open arms and a big smile on his face, was the moment of pure happiness. When I recall that particular moment, I feel ecstatic and that raises my vibration instantly. So, find some special moments in your life and create a positive feeling on demand. This is a proven stress killer! Anything you start doing with a positive state of mind will be very easy.

Planning and prioritizing

Making a sustainable plan is a crucial step of every project. And that means, first of all, defining your priorities and eliminating all the time consuming but unnecessary tasks from your daily/weekly schedule. While making your to do list ask yourself: Is this really important? If you come to the conclusion that it’s not, just erase it. Concentrate only on the most important things. Do one thing at the time and eliminate all the distractions. Close your Facebook profile, turn the ringers off your phone. You don’t have to answer every phone call. Ask your self is it more important to talk to that person right now or to finish what you are doing. Always keep control by choosing your priorities.

Creating more time

And last, but not least, stop repeating that you don’t have time. You will always have enough time for the most important things if you choose to take time. And if you believe that you never have enough time, you will never have enough of it. What you think becomes your reality. It’s just the way it is. So, don’t create your reality by default. Choose it, plan it and stick to the plan and whenever you feel stuck, just stop and breathe.