10 Tips on Reducing Stress

Stress can be positive or negative and while most people thrive on positive stress (which is the excitement and challenge and the nerves associated with an important project or presentation) prolonged periods of negative stress can be extremely harmful to one’s physical and mental well being.

In the past year, the economic crisis across the globe has meant that many people have had to work harder and for longer at work under far greater pressure. In addition, the number of unemployed people in Australia is set to rise increasing stress levels for many which in turn will lead to greater physical and mental illness.

How to reduce and cope with stress

1) Change or isolate the stress you experience

It’s important to know yourself and the limits of your capacity and capabilities and perhaps your pressure points. If you know how and when you get stressed and can identify certain situations, circumstances, people or projects that cause you stress then you can learn to avoid or overcome these issues. In turn you can then better avoid it or manage it.

2) Know what you are meant to be doing in your life and at work

Often stress comes from not having a clear purpose in your life or at work. Be clear on how you fit into your organisation, your reason for being there and the key tasks or projects that must be undertaken.

3) Review your priorities

Do this regularly and focus on the important and urgent. Stress sometimes comes from feeling overwhelmed or by focusing on the wrong things at the wrong time. This leaves you less time to manage the important issues or situations. Therefore you should regularly review and prioritise your work load to ensure that you are focusing on the important things.

You may need to review the most urgent and important projects in conjunction with your users so that you are all aware of what can and should be your focus.

4) Accept that you cannot do everything

Sometimes reducing stress can come from the fact of realising that you can’t and aren’t meant to finish every project or responsibility in your job spec every day or week or month. Some things have to be left undone or unfinished.

5) Learn to say no and manage expectations

Often stress arises because you fail to manage user expectations at the outset of a project or time period. By learning to say no or by providing a realistic time frame you start to dissolve some of the pressure and stress on yourself although initially it can involve more short-term stress, as you have to communicate and discuss your issues with the user who may not initially be receptive. However once this is done you have a more realistic time frame.

6) Learn to delegate

It’s easy to feel that you have to complete or control each part of the task or process particularly if you are someone who is passionate about the details and the process itself. You can reduce the stress involved in both the work load and the feeling that you are the reason for the delay by learning to delegate tasks to others that don’t have to be completed by you.

The difficult part of delegation is that to begin with it involves more of your time, thereby increasing, not reducing, your pressure and stress. In order to teach your colleague and also for you to learn to accept that they will have a different style. However once you have mastered this technique you can reduce your own stress.

7) Beware of the work/home collision

Often a key source of stress is when work and home collide and you feel like you are being pulled in both directions. It’s important to clearly define and protect the borders between work and home. Discuss with the key stakeholders (ie family, partner, work colleagues and manager) in your life what their expectations are and how they expect you to mange the collision. You then have a clearer understanding of where everyone is coming from and what they and you expect. This clarity will help you.

8) Ensure you can talk through issues

The old clich