Stop Stress at Work! — 5 Strategies

What a weekly video! I’ve got too many things on my to-do list. I can’t possibly get to the video. Just kidding! So, last week, I did a video about cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and all about our physiology. If you didn’t see it, you should tune into it. It’s really helpful and kind of in keeping with this week’s video, which is all about work stress. So many of us find that the most stressful aspect of our lives is our lives in our workplaces. There are levels of stress that are actually helpful to us; they call that eustress, where we’re kind of maximizing performance. That’s all well and good, but too often we’re chronically stressed. We’re anxious, we’re pushing too hard, too long, day after day after day, and ultimately it leads to burnout. We don’t want that. So, this week, I’ve got five tips for managing workplace stress. Stay tuned, coming right up.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so our workplaces are often very stressful. There’s huge time demands, there’s simply the volume of work, there’s the internal politics and interpersonal stuff that’s not great, and sometimes there’s just uncertainty. We don’t know where the business is going, if our job security is there, if our product line is going to make it, and there’s just a lot of change often underway, including these days, constant technological change. I’ve done a video in the past that maybe David will keep a link in the description about burnout. We’re not talking about managing burnout in this video. We’re talking about preventative medicine, so we never get there. I’ve got five very basic tips, but really effective tips.

The first one is creating clear demarcations about your work day separate from other parts of your day. This is not easy. We often encroach on our personal lives because we think we have to catch up or do more at work, and it’s a function of setting basic boundaries. If keeping boundaries during the day is difficult, I recommend at least keeping clear boundaries for the beginning and the end of the work day, so that you go into work at the same time every day, and you leave work at the same time every day. And that is not easy. I get it. Often we’re so selfless and self-sacrificing that it’s very, very difficult to not just stay an extra 10 minutes, or stay an extra half hour, or an extra two hours, and so on, where we just really don’t have any clear delineation between our personal lives and our work lives. There are tricks that you can do to help do that. Maybe just setting up a calendar item in your thing that says “go home”. Make an appointment with your personal trainer at the gym for 4:45, so that you have to leave the office at 4:25. It might be that your kid’s day care schedule or the train that you have to catch and you can design things into your lives that force you to comply with your own desire to have a clear boundary in your work.

If your workplace gives you a cell phone, buy for yourself a second cell phone, and your workplace cell phone gets turned off at the end of the workday. But in some countries, in France, it’s actually illegal to send emails to your employees after their work day ends. And here in North America, we have no clue about those kind of boundaries. Clear demarcations about our work day from our personal life. The second one is this rule that I call “45 and 5”. It’s this idea that we’re not really designed as a species, as a human creature on earth, to work at prolonged tasks for very, very long without breaks. If you look at people in their natural habitats, but the kind of things that we do, if you’re even just watching TV, you’re going to get up every 45 minutes, take a pee, go get a snack, just stretch yourself, whatever. If you watch people working physical jobs, they naturally take little mini breaks. They’re often very small, but if we could stretch that out and become clear in our minds that we need a break approximately every 45 minutes, that’s kind of arbitrary, but certainly we’re not good at sustained tasks for hours at a time.

So if we even put into our schedule that a little bell goes off at 45 minutes, every 45 minutes in the workday. It’s as little as getting up and stretching, rolling your back, maybe looking, checking your personal cell phone for something interesting. I was lucky enough in my last corporate job to have access to the outdoors immediately outside of my office. So I could get up from my desk, walk about 25 steps, and I’d be outside. I just have five minutes to breathe some fresh air. What a great way to take a break, and that ability to get outside is especially important if you can manage that. The third tip, nurture your friend network at work. There’s all kinds of evidence that our mental health is significantly improved when we’ve got friends at our workplace. So, I, you know, there’s some people that I thought were my dearest friends, and they were my work friends. I didn’t see them outside of work, but I loved those people.

When I came to work, it was pleasing to me to know when to hear about their lives and share my own life. So, by nurturing that friend network and taking the time to establish good relationships, have casual conversations in order to establish a lot of trust, we need to share our personal lives. To have one or two people at the workplace that we really feel are people who get us, and we get them, it’s a huge benefit.

The fourth tip is this: get some perspective. We often have this sense of frenzy and I feel that even in my current work. I have a small team of people that I work with and I have this huge to-do list. I’m often trying to delegate tasks to certain people, and I contract out certain things, and yet, my to-do list never seems to get smaller. In fact, it’s constantly nagging at me, pressure to do stuff, and there’s things on my to-do list that have been months there that I simply can’t seem to get around to. And it’s even I think about it talking to you, it makes me a little anxious.

The truth is, when I’m reflective on what we’ve accomplished as a team since I started this business a number of years ago, it’s remarkable. Like, there’s just so many things that have been done but we very rarely are focused on the accomplishments. We’re always looking to the next thing that needs to get done. And there’s simple things that you can do. You know, it might be formal reflection, hey, what have we accomplished this week, this month? And you know, give yourself a little pat on the back, talk to your team about it. Write on a post-it note every time you complete a substantial, meaningful to-do item and you could have a wall in front of you where you just put up that post-it note. Sent the email to prospect A, I wrote a new chapter in the book, you know, all these things that you are accomplishing. If there was some way to make it visual and tangible to you that you’re getting stuff done, there may be a psychic reward, a mental health benefit to simply reflecting on the amazing amount of work that you actually get accomplished and turn you away from that frenzied perspective of all the things that are still on your to-do list.

Finally, this tip, and it’s a very sincere one: we actively need to deal with overloaded tasks. So, if we’re genuinely in a situation, where many of us are, where we simply can’t keep up, there’s more work than we can possibly do, and there’s this internal pressure that’s eating away at us and hurting our health, then we need to go out and seek help. Often, I think, people are afraid to do that. They think it’ll show weakness or they think the employer will look to other people to take on their projects or they might think that they’re just not capable of the task and they’ll lose their job. And that is very rarely the truth, incredibly rare. People who have been employed for any length of time are often highly valued by the employer, even though the employer does not treat them that way. They’re just rented mules that give more work, more work, more work because whoever’s supervising you is feeling the same way that they’ve got too much to do and so they’re just pushing off work to other people all the time.

So, to simply go in and be a little bit vulnerable and say, look, I am struggling to keep up. I’m staying awake at night. I’m feeling staying too late at the office. I need some help. There’s got to be some ways to relieve some pressure, re-prioritizing my tasks, delegating some of my tasks, or simply eliminating some of the things that you think that I need to be doing. Now, obviously, if you are a new hire and haven’t proven yourself, sometimes no, it’s easier said than done. You might have to just suck it up, buttercup, because there’s times when we do have to really roll up our sleeves and get stuff done. But on the whole, if you’re an established employee, you might find that there’s more receptivity to this conversation about reducing workload, managing the tasks better, setting new expectations, and priorities goes a lot further than you actually think.

So, there it is, that’s my contribution for this week. That managing workplace stress, it’s doable. It’s important that we do it and I really think that you should grab a few of these ideas from this list of five things that might help you in your workplace. Thanks so much for watching. See you next time. If you like this content, click the like button, share the video with your friends and family, and maybe with your HR director. Bye for now.