Ten Things You Can Do To Decrease Your Stress At The Office

The world we live on is noth­ing but a mound of chaotic pres­sure that is build­ing to the point it bursts like a vol­cano. We are bom­barded with pres­sure from our employ­ers, our cus­tomers and fam­i­lies to the point where some peo­ple actu­ally do break. Most of us today in pro­fes­sional lives spend between 8 and 16 hours a day at the office, which equates to almost two-thirds of our lives being in a place we really do not want to be in, but there are things you can do to decrease the stress.

Remem­ber this, what we call stress, is really what we put on our­selves. Whilst other peo­ple can influ­ence the way we feel, ulti­mately we are the ones who choose whether we are going to be stressed or not. You are in con­trol of how you are going to feel, no one else. Stress as such is going on in our heads, so the real secret to de-stressing is to find things that would make you happy and con­tent within.

1. Have a Photo Of The Hap­pi­est Time In Your Life

Think back through your life, what is the hap­pi­est moment in your life. It could be the birth of your child, get­ting mar­ried, going out on a fan­tas­tic date, vis­it­ing some out­stand­ing place or maybe it is when you bought your puppy dog but no mat­ter what it is, you will almost cer­tainly have a photo of that time. Take that photo and put it on your desk to remind you of those happy times as this will be one of the tools you need to beat stress in your office.

The hap­pi­est time in my life, and where I felt like the luck­i­est man in the world, was the day my wife stepped out of the lim­ou­sine at the church for our wed­ding. I had never seen my wife look so beau­ti­ful and I made sure when I felt those feel­ings that I would remem­ber them for­ever. So on my desk at work, I have a pic­ture of my wife get­ting out of the lim­ou­sine and each time I feel stressed I sim­ply take a few moments to look at that pic­ture and remem­ber that moment in time. You brain is an amaz­ing part of your body, no mat­ter how many times I look at that photo, my brain releases the same feel­ings I had on the day and helps me snap out of feel­ing stressed.

Use the happy times, to con­trol the times when you feel the most vul­ner­a­ble and stressed.

2. Think Of Your Boss Yelling At You Naked

Every­one has night­mare sto­ries of their bosses being a grouch and I cer­tainly have had my fair share, but most peo­ple who talk of being exces­sively stressed often relate that stress to a boss who is abu­sive and yells a lot. Well first off, if you are work­ing in an envi­ron­ment where you boss is abu­sive, get out NOW! Nobody has to put up with that and remem­ber life is way to short regard­less of the money. Is money worth that much that the stress is worth dying tomor­row from a heart attack? NO!

How­ever, if you have a boss who yells at you a lot, just for the sake of yelling and really is quite rude, sim­ply imag­ine them yelling at you naked. If some­one flew into your office absolutely starkas, that is with absolutely no clothes on, would you take them seri­ously. Course not! So, why take a boss that comes in and yells at you seri­ously. If your boss is an effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tor he or she would not need to yell at you.

The next time your boss comes in, force your­self to think of them absolutely naked. When you do that, see just how you actu­ally react and whether you deal with the sit­u­a­tion bet­ter than when they are yelling at you absolutely naked. After a bit of prac­tice you will find you are able to han­dle the sit­u­a­tion much bet­ter and cope with a grouchy boss.

3. Get Up and Do Some Office Exercises

Look no one on the planet can deny that doing exer­cise, gets the blood going and burns off the stress how­ever sneak­ing away dur­ing the day can be really dif­fi­cult but there are other Office Exer­cises that can bring you a lot of ben­e­fit to you. There are many office exer­cises that you can do like rolling your shoul­ders, clench­ing your hands and releas­ing them and even neck exer­cises that will help release the stress.

Often, much of our built up stress is sim­ply due to sit­ting at the com­puter all day look­ing at the screen. Make sure that every hour you get up and stretch for at least five min­utes. You will find that if you do not do that over a period of time this will lead to aches and pains, which can help increase your stress.

To get the best Office Exer­cises for you to do sim­ply talk to your Gen­eral Prac­ti­tioner or visit a Phys­io­ther­a­pist and they will be able to help you develop an Office Exer­cise plan and you will be sur­prised how much eas­ier life is to cope with.

4. Sched­ule Enough Time to Go From One Meet­ing To Another

I worked for a bank about five years ago and I have never met an organ­i­sa­tion that has so many meet­ings. My whole days con­sti­tuted going from one meet­ing to another and I learnt one very impor­tant les­son. If I did not run my sched­ule my meet­ings would. Make sure that when you sched­ule an appoint­ment or a meet­ing that you include travel time to and from a meeting.

Whilst work­ing for this firm, if you did not sched­ule travel time, they would sim­ply book meet­ings next to each other even if the meet­ing was across the other side of the city. They would sim­ply expect you to imme­di­ately appear at that other meeting.

Mes­sage to All Humans — we do not have an instant tele­porter, the Star­gate is a fan­tasy, so make sure you give your­self enough time to get from one meet­ing to another or you are going to stress out.

5. Plan Your Day

We talked about sched­ul­ing time to get from one meet­ing to another in the pre­vi­ous point but there is an exten­sion to this. Make sure YOU plan your day, not your busi­ness asso­ciates. All too often I hear man­age­ment say, “I did not get lunch today” or ” I have been on the run and have not had a chance to stop”. Come on, get a grip, you are in con­trol and it is up to you.

The first thing you should do in every job you work in, is to make sure you sched­ule two decent breaks a day which include at least half an hour for lunch and a 20 minute break some­where else in the day. If you are like most peo­ple you will be using some­thing like Microsoft Out­look or Lotus Notes to man­age your day. Both allow you to sched­ule unavail­able time in your cal­en­dar, so do IT!

By sched­ul­ing YOU time, you can ensure you have enough time to have a break, do a lit­tle med­i­ta­tion and relax and pre­pare for the rest of the day. If you are like me and work 16 hours a day, then you should also be putting into your plan a decent Din­ner break of at least an hour and half an hour at the gym, even if it is just using the tread­mill. If you do not do this, it will catch you up to you and you will be a sta­tis­tic at 40. Do not laugh, my lead­ing hand lost his life because he did not do the right thing. It can hap­pen to you.

6. Limit the Amount of Time Spent Deal­ing With Emails

Tech­nol­ogy is a won­der­ful thing, but when tech­nol­ogy rules your life, then you have a big prob­lem and very quickly tech­nol­ogy like email can over­whelm you caus­ing you to become stressed. One of the rules my team and I have in the office is that nobody must respond to emails for more than 60 min­utes per day. The rea­son we have put this rule into place, is that many of my team and our cor­po­rate clients spend their whole day email­ing each other rather than deal­ing with the issues at hand.

How often have you received an email on one topic and then have the con­tent of the email go off in another direc­tion right before your eyes? I was work­ing in one cor­po­rate organ­i­sa­tion as an exter­nal con­sul­tant and very often all I would do is sim­ply respond to emails all day long and get noth­ing done. Most of the emails could have been dealt with a 2 sec­ond phone call. In one of the offices I was work­ing in, it was an open plan office lay­out and I had a bloke work­ing directly across from me, who refused to speak to me or any­one else on the floor and all he did was when he had an issue, he would send an email.

This is a crazy way to do busi­ness and it does not work and only causes tech­nol­ogy stress. My solu­tion, each time he emailed me, I sim­ply spoke the answer back to him. He got the point after a while and my email load went down when he spoke to me rather than emailed me. Tech­nol­ogy is sup­posed to make life eas­ier, not take over your life, so if you have a ques­tion and the per­son is sit­ting in the next office, get up and knock on their door and ask the question.

By doing this you are under­tak­ing item num­ber 6 which is lim­it­ing your emails and item num­ber 3 which is get up and do some office exer­cises. That lit­tle bit of walk­ing will help get the blood flow­ing through you veins.

7. Be Pre­pared To Say “NO!”

We all want to get ahead in the world today and I am sure in every­one there is a lit­tle part of us that wants to live the life of Bill Gates and Don­ald Trump and be as rich as them. How­ever, most of us make the mis­take of sim­ply say­ing yes to every­thing that is thrown at us. Now whilst that is great to say yes, peo­ple like Bill Gates and Don­ald Trump have teams of peo­ple to help them, and in all hon­esty you maybe on their teams, but all of us are only human and some­times we sim­ply have to say “NO!”

Where is the point in say­ing to our bosses, “Yes we will have this 500 page report writ­ten for you tomor­row”. When in real­ity there is absolutely no chance of that occur­ring. Some­times in this world you sim­ply have to say no and that does not go just for the boss, it also goes for the cus­tomers as well. My team and I have a seven day sched­ule across the var­i­ous busi­nesses I run and whilst we do not all work seven days a week, some­times we do work six days a week to get through our respon­si­bil­i­ties. One week­end I had one of our cus­tomers, mind you it was 6:30 am on a Sun­day morn­ing demand one of my team from our car clean­ing busi­ness, drop every­thing and clean their car at 7:00am because an impor­tant fam­ily mem­ber was coming.

There were many responses I could have given, but my sim­ple answer was NO! The cus­tomer ranted and raved for about 10 min­utes by which time I was imag­in­ing them naked yelling at me, which really was a funny site and then when they were fin­ished and I sim­ply asked them would they be pre­pared to work all week includ­ing Sat­ur­day and Sun­day for the next 2 weeks and their reply was “NO, My Week­ends Are My Own and I am not work­ing them for any­one.” Then I sim­ply respond­ing by say­ing to them, then there is your answer and I hung up. You know the funny thing, they rang me on Mon­day morn­ing and apol­o­gised and we did the top car clean­ing ser­vice on their car the fol­low­ing week. I charged them more as well.

Most cus­tomers will accept the answer of No when they under­stand why you are say­ing No. Some will not, but then do you really need them as cus­tomers anyway.

8. Take your shoes off and walk on the carpet

This is my favorite de-stressing activ­ity and it shocks the liv­ing day­lights out of every­one. I first met a lady about 10 years ago who was in her early fortys and noth­ing seemed to shake her stature. She was always calm and never got flus­tered and I asked her what her secret was and she said, “I always take my shoes off as often as pos­si­ble so I can stay in touch with the earth”. This was a really promi­nent state­ment for me, because I never really thought of my shoes as a tool to dis­con­nect us from our sur­round­ings but if you think about it, it makes sense.

If you go down to the beach, what is the first thing you do. You take off your shoes to feel the sand through you feet and how does it make you feel, relaxed. If you go to the park with the chil­dren, what do you do? Take your shoes off so you can run around and have fun or to play in the mud. Whether we realise it or not, when we dis­con­nect our­selves from mother earth we really do start to stress.

I now always take my shoes off when I am work­ing in my office, includ­ing my socks just so I can feel some­thing more inspi­ra­tional under my feet rather than just the hard soles of my shoes. I know another cor­po­rate CEO in Bris­bane Aus­tralia, who used to walk down to Anzac Square every lunch hour to walk on the grass so that he could stay in touch with the world. Hey, if it works in the movie Pretty Woman, surely it must work.

9. Play Music

Lis­ten­ing to the right type of music is really impor­tant when you are try­ing to reduce stress and find your inner peace. Some music when lis­tened to, whilst stressed, can in fact heighten your stress lev­els. One type of music, which research has shown to help reduce stress is Baroque music. This music is writ­ten so that there is only 60 beats per minute and funny enough that is what our heart rate should be. The baroque music has been found to increase the alpha waves in your left and right sides of your brain which help improve your learn­ing abil­ity, cre­ativ­ity and calmness.

Whilst you are work­ing in the office on a demand­ing piece of work, sim­ply put in a CDROM of music and lis­ten to it as you are com­plet­ing the work, but hon­estly do watch the type of music you are lis­ten­ing to or it can back fire. Most cor­po­rate organ­i­sa­tions are now real­is­ing the ben­e­fit of staff lis­ten­ing to music dur­ing the day and with 90% of cor­po­rate com­put­ers hav­ing CDROMs, it is pos­si­ble to lis­ten to music on your com­puter whilst doing your work, you may just need head­phones. I work in hun­dreds of cor­po­rate organ­i­sa­tions a year and only one had a no music pol­icy and that was because they were a call cen­tre, which I can under­stand. There is no rea­son why you can not lis­ten to music dur­ing your break though to ensure you a feel­ing calm before hit­ting those phones again.

10. Med­i­tate

Okay, I can hear it now, “Oh Yeah Hippy, Want Us to Med­i­tate do ya.” Absolutely! Look whilst med­i­ta­tion has cer­tainly been a thing of fringe groups in west­ern soci­ety or asso­ci­ated with more east­ern reli­gions many researchers are now com­ing to the dis­tinct con­clu­sion that med­i­ta­tion can make a huge dif­fer­ence to our day-to-day lives and helps us to over­come stress.

The core advan­tage med­i­ta­tion will play in your office is to help you to relax and deal with chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions more effec­tively. The more relaxed you are the more cre­ative you can be in deal­ing with any issues that arise. I cer­tainly rec­om­mend that when you are med­i­tat­ing, that you use baroque music with your med­i­ta­tion as it will help increase the alpha waves which will help lead you to a calm feel­ing. This is espe­cially use­ful if you do not have a long period to med­i­tate. I rec­om­mend a 20 minute med­i­ta­tion ses­sion at least once a day prefer­ably two. You will be really sur­prised the dif­fer­ence it makes to your day. Just try it out, you have noth­ing to loose and the rest of your life to gain

The office envi­ron­ment in these mil­len­nia is far more stress­ful than they were a cen­tury ago, but there are things you can do about it but it is up to you. Remem­ber, we only have one life and it is not a dress rehearsal so get out and reduce the stress your office gives you and have some fun. To fin­ish off let me reit­er­ate the ten things you can do to reduce your stress at the office.

1. Have a Photo Of The Hap­pi­est Time In Your Life
2. Think Of Your Boss Yelling At You Naked
3. Get Up and Do Some Office Exer­cises
4. Sched­ule Enough Time to Go From One Meet­ing To Another
5. Plan Your Day
6. Limit the Amount of Time Spent Deal­ing With Emails.
7. Be Pre­pared To Say “NO!“
8. Take your shoes off and walk on the car­pet
9. Play Music
10. Meditate