It’s easy to tell when you’re barely surviving your 9-5 grind. The symptoms are hard to miss: constant headaches, finding yourself worrying about the future, losing your focus at work, and perhaps the most amusing of them all is that you find yourself dreading clocking in the next day.
We’ve all been there, and guess what, there are surprisingly easy ways to deal with stress.
Work Comfortably
An uncomfortable workplace might not instantly hit you as a place you should be wary about, but over time, an uncomfortable desk, chair, and environment will only make it more difficult for you to focus on your work. Your work environment plays an important role in your personal performance, and when left unchanged, you will only succumb to the stress it brings.
If you want to get the most out of your work day, start by ensuring that your workplace suits your preference. If you are not fond of sitting for hours, ditch your bulky work table for a sit-and-stand converter desk so you can adjust your desk’s height to one that suits your posture, work position, and mood.
Most IT headquarters across North America understand the downsides of a poor office design, which is why many headquarters today look like fun environments to be in. It goes without saying that this “Millennial” approach to office design can do wonders for the body. More headquarters today boast yoga centers, gyms, sleeping rooms, and even state-of-the-art cafeterias that look like restaurants.
Working comfortably is not limited to make your office look beautiful; it also means keeping your files and equipment organized. Those little wires and cables sticking out from under desks, for example, could be tidied up with cable and wire organizers, and the end result: a cleaner environment
Take in the Sun Whenever You Can
Sometimes, forgetting about work and getting in touch with nature eases the stress that may be lingering in your body. When you have the chance, use your break time to break away from the frequencies of your computer and soak in some sunlight. While you’re at it, do some breathing exercises, so you can get oxygen circulating through your body again after a long period of little to no movement.
Vitamin D also does wonders at fighting stress and its effects which may be affecting you mentally, and even physically. Through its healing properties, vitamin D helps reduce the debilitating effects of stress fractures, which may be a result of poor workplace routines and conditions.
Learn to Unplug from Your Work Life
If you find yourself doing what you’re currently doing for the rest of your life, congratulations-- not a lot of professionals can say the same about themselves or their career trajectories. However, never forget that you need to have some me-time, too. Learn to “break up” from your professional life the moment you step home. Not only will this decrease your exposure to the stressors from work, it’ll help you spend quality time with the people who truly matter: your loved ones, your family, and your good friends.
Get into Some Office Yoga
Yoga is not just a physical exercise intended to help practitioners maintain their slender and flexible figures. Yoga is als the perfect exercise for professionals who want to meditate and de-stress.
The best thing about yoga is that it can be done anywhere as long as there is ample room for you to perform certain yoga movements. This doesn’t mean having a huge office either, since there are yoga systems that were designed to be practiced in offices.
Find the Right People to Help You With Your Tasks
Sometimes, the trick to getting more work done is to find the right people to help you with it. Instead of doing all the analyzing by yourself, perhaps you could consult a friend or a colleague who may have done the same projects you are working on now, and seek their honest advice. You’d be surprised to know how many people would be excited to help you if you only asked.
Set a Bedtime
You might think that just because you’ve outgrown your eight-year-old self, you don’t need a bedtime anymore. Surprisingly, keeping a bedtime is one of the best ways to fight off stress. Your body needs an appropriate time for rest. Not meeting at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep per day will result in you showing up to work in a more exhausted state than the day prior.
“Can it Be an Email?”
Finally, here’s a trick that Elon Musk uses whenever he finds himself wanting to call a meeting so he and his team can discuss something important: he asks himself if it can be sent in an email instead.
Useless meetings and seminars are the biggest time wasters; unfortunately, many offices do not realize how they’ve wasted their time unless they’re already a few minutes into the meeting. Before you find yourself wanting to call for a short discussion, ask yourself if you should even bother sending out a mass message and see if you can summarize your ideas in an email instead.
The beauty of discussing business decisions in emails is that you have a paper trail, so if you forgot what you had planned initially, you can always reread your thread of messages.
