12 Stress-Relieving Strategies For When Work Feels Overwhelming
There’s no escaping the stressors we encounter at work. However, although they’re a regular part of your everyday work life, that doesn’t mean they have to be constant or that you can’t do anything about them.
Stressors can, in the long run, affect how you work and how you view your work. No matter how much you love your job, if you’re burned out, you won’t find the things you once enjoyed about it anymore. Worse, you also won’t perform as well or be productive because burnout keeps you chained down.
To create a better and more positive working environment, identify the key stressors that make you feel as if you’re overextending yourself. Create boundaries and stick to them to manage your work-life balance better. If you need more help, check out this list packed with 12 tips to help you be more productive and less stressed at work.
Engage In Deep Breathing Exercises
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and think everything around you is happening simultaneously, pause and take a breather. Practice deep breathing exercises to keep yourself calm, cool, and collected.
This is one of the best ways to instantly relax your body, reduce tension, and relieve stress. When you take deep breaths, you send messages to your brain to calm down, and your brain then sends the same message to the rest of your body.
A 2023 Frontiers in Physiology article reveals that daily breathing exercises significantly reduce blood pressure and stress in adults. They’re also very versatile and time-efficient, as no equipment is needed.
Plan Ahead and Keep Things Organized
There’s no denying how easy it is to get swamped with work. This is especially so when you don’t have a schedule that will allow you to work productively and smoothly.
Planning ahead and keeping things orderly through a schedule ensures you can complete your work efficiently and on time. Gone are the days when you felt that everything was urgent, as you now know which ones to prioritize.
Doing this can also allow you to do the most important tasks assigned to you first. This means you can do them better and faster, as you have the most energy while working on them.
Head Out For a Walk and Get Some Fresh Air
Getting stuck to your desk can easily happen when you’re swamped with work. However, no matter how busy you are, remember that taking short and quick breaks away from your computer screen will help you truly be productive.
Walking has long been proven to offer us many benefits that go way beyond the physical. In fact, it can boost your emotional well-being and help you avoid experiencing symptoms related to chronic mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression.
These positive benefits of walking manifest themselves in the workplace, too. By taking breaks every now and then, walking, and moving our bodies, we can better concentrate and increase our creativity and productivity.
Keep a Journal and Note Your Stressors
Journaling is one of the most effective ways to banish negative thoughts and emotions. It can also help with stress management at work.
When you have a journal, you have something concrete to look back on whenever you feel stress coming. Through it, you can identify which situations create the most stress and, in the future, think of how to respond to or avoid them.
The American Psychological Association recommends recording our thoughts, feelings, the people involved, information about the environment, and the circumstances we were put in. At the same time, it’s important to include how you reacted to what you went through.
Give Yourself Time To Recharge
Whether you love your work or not, let’s be honest: it’s hard to completely detach yourself from it. Because of this, even when you’re off the clock, you’re sometimes compelled to still answer messages or emails, especially if they’re from your boss.
However, you must remember that your work shouldn’t take over your personal life. When you’re off work and at home or on vacation, then that’s time for you to recharge yourself. No matter how much you love your job, if you can’t take breaks from it every once in a while, you’ll grow to resent it.
A 2023 Winds of Change magazine article explains that setting aside time to recharge and relax can help reduce stress and anxiety. Doing so will allow you to focus on what you enjoy, strengthening you physically and mentally.
Listen To Music
Listening to music is more than just about passing the time. In fact, it’s been proven to help people maintain their mental health.
A 2023 article from Penn Medicine explains that playing and listening to music has been linked to several physical and mental benefits. In more ways than one, music also helped people cope during the pandemic.
It’s also been revealed that music helps reduce a person’s cortisol levels. This, in turn, helps them sleep and reduce burnout and depression.
Create and Maintain Boundaries
No matter your situation, you’ll feel burned out if you don’t establish clear boundaries with others. This is because you give and give and give without rest or without getting anything in return.
This is why creating and maintaining clear boundaries with colleagues and your work can help protect your overall well-being. Doing so ensures you do not overextend yourself and give more than you can or should. This will also allow for a better work-life balance.
Transform Your Workspace and Remove Clutter
You may not think it, but your workspace says a lot about you and how you work. Though some think of clutter as organized chaos, it’s worth knowing that it can distract you from your work and make you unable to focus.
Conversely, a clutter-free desk that’s clear and organized ensures the least amount of distractions possible. When you clear out your workspace, you’ll be more capable of focusing on tasks and maintaining better concentration overall.
Attend To Your Main Priorities
When you’re in the thick of the moment, it’s understandable to feel that every task you’re given is urgent and of the utmost priority. However, when you review them, you’ll realize there’s still a hierarchy to the urgency of the tasks.
Working efficiently is all about finding the right balance. This means understanding what’s important and what you should work on first.
When you prioritize your tasks, you can determine what you should work on and accomplish first based on importance. In the long run, this will help you better handle your workload, no matter how packed it may seem on the outside.
Follow a Balanced Diet and Ensure You Get Enough Sleep
A nutritious, balanced diet and ample sleep do wonders for our physical health. They also offer many benefits for our mental well-being and mood.
In addition, a balanced diet provides your body with all the vitamins, antioxidants, and minerals it needs to thrive. According to a 2023 article from White River Manor, an addiction rehabilitation center in South Africa, these things help one maintain overall health, allowing one to better manage stress and prevent burnout.
Steer Clear of Unhealthy Habits and Coping Mechanisms
On the outside, your unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms, like drinking or smoking, may feel as if they’re helping. After all, they make you feel calm at that particular moment in time.
Even though this is the case, it’s essential to keep in mind that the comfort and relief you get from them are only temporary. In fact, continuing life with these habits will likely lead to harm and more problems in the long term, such as addiction or other health issues.
Be Social and Reach Out to Other People
When you start to feel burnout creeping in at work, it’s easy to think of your colleagues as enemies. However, they can often be great support systems, too.
When you reach out to other people going through the same things you are, you get the social support that you wouldn’t have acquired anywhere else. The positive social contact or bond you create releases hormones that make you feel better and lighter overall. They give you a burst of happiness, which, in turn, can reduce stress and lower cortisol levels.
