STRESS: TOP TIPS
We all need some stress in our lives to motivate us and push us through tasks that we need to get done, but too much stress can have negative impacts on our lives, our mental well-being, and our health. We’ve put together our top five tips on tackling stress to help you stay happy and healthy!
Focus on relaxing your muscles.
When we’re stressed, without even realising it, we tense up. The most common areas this can be is our neck and shoulder muscles, our jaw, and our foreheads. This can lead to headaches, pain, and even more tension! It’s important to take a break and focus your attention on relaxing these areas where you feel tension, and physically feel them relax.
2. Make sure you plan in regular breaks.
It’s easy to get swept up in tasks and forget to take breaks. Often it can feel as though taking frequent breaks is counterproductive, as it takes away time we could be spending on finishing a job. But, as always, it’s about quality, not quantity. Although on the surface it may seem that spending 8 hours solid working on a job is better than 5 or 6 hours - this isn’t true. If your brain is fatigued by the end, it won’t be producing the quality you want it to. Taking breaks to rest and refresh will help you to sustain quality in whatever you are doing.
3. Split up your ‘To Do List’.
We love making lists, right? It helps to keep up on track and focused on the tasks we need to complete. Sometimes this can become overwhelming, especially if we see tasks being added to the list quicker than they’re being removed. Our top tip here would be, split your list down into:
Have to do today
Have to do this week
Would be nice to do today
Would be nice to do this week
By breaking it up this way, you can focus on a smaller list and not just tick off all the easy jobs you want to do first, leaving a list of big jobs you’ve avoided at the end.
4. Good quality sleep.
This is a tip which seems to appear everywhere, but when our cortisol levels (the stress hormone) are elevated, the quality of our sleep is affected. It’s important to make sure you are giving yourself enough time to wind down at the end of the day. Again, when we are stressed, it’s tempting to work on a task every minute that we have. This can lead to working late, only to shut our laptops down and fall into bed. Winding down can look different for everyone – it can be having a bath before bed, watching some television you enjoy, reading, or even writing down in a journal anything you feel has added to your stress that day. This will give you the best opportunity to drift off into deep sleep, and make you feel more able to face the day tomorrow!
5. Seeing loved ones.
During stressful periods, we can often become quite insular and pull away from the people closest to us. Stress can also make us feel like we’re the only ones going through something, and that other people either wouldn’t understand, or that we would burden them with our issues. But, making time for loved ones can improve our mood, it can give us someone to talk to, and it can sometimes give us a fresh, new perspective on a problem that has been stressing us out. You’ll find that, more often than not, they have experienced stress levels similar to yours, and could offer you some pearls of wisdom that would help you.
Stress is normal in everyday life for short periods of time, but if stress is going on for weeks at a time and you feel like you don’t ever have time to fully recover from one stressful period before another starts, it’s important to seek professional help for this. find out more about how we can help with stress here.
Be sure to check out our socials: Facebook and Instagram.
Take care!
