Top Tips On Managing Stress

Sarah Highfield, Yoga Teacher and Founder of Yogagise

As a formerly stressed out PR professional and now much happier & balanced Yoga Teacher and founder of Yogagise, I am an expert on how to deal with and manage stress.

According to the 2018 Qualtrics (an employee experience company) survey, in the UK alone, 47% of workers spend the majority of their time feeling overwhelmed by their workloads and 85% of workers say that work is causing them stress. These are worrying figures, especially when the outcomes of stress are well documented - unproductivity, poor health, mental & physical burnout, depression, the list goes on. Stress can affect people from all backgrounds, in all professions and at all levels, so here are my top five tips to help you deal with it:

Be present

Learn to live in the present moment- we spend so much time fixated on the past or anxious about the future that we don’t live in the present. Don’t allow past problems or future concerns to dominate the present. Don’t delay gratification - ‘Someday’ is not better than today. Be present with your family, when you work, with yourself and with other people and remember that time is something that you cannot get back.

Avoid multitasking, it kills productivity

Have you ever sat on a conference call and sent an email at the same time? Did you maybe have to send a second email shortly after with the attachment that you forgot to attach to the first email? Then did you ever have to send a third email explaining to the recipient why the attachment in the second email wasn’t what they were expecting? Finally, while this was happening, you missed a question directed at you on the call!

When you think you are multi-tasking, what you’re really doing is “switch-tasking” - switching back and forth rapidly between two or more tasks.

There are three consequences of multitasking:

1. Tasks takes longer
2. Mistakes increase
3. Stress levels increase

By focusing on one thing at a time, you will feel much more engaged and present, your productivity will improve and your stress levels will drop.

Look for the positive and you will see it

We see the world as we are, not as it is. A positive person will see the world with positivity and a negative person will see the world with negativity. We all have friends who are super positive about everything and friends who are negative about everything. As Richard Carlson wrote in his book: ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff…and it’s all small stuff’, maybe, just for fun:

• Imagine that everyone around you is enlightened, except you.
• Imagine that the people you meet are all here to teach you something. Even those people that you find rude or obnoxious, they are here to teach you about patience.
• And the people who you think are “weird”, they are here to teach you not to be judgemental.
• And even the slow queue at the bank because the cashier is taking forever, this is a lesson in compassion, imagine how hard it would be to have a job that you don’t like?
• So now your job is to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you.

If you can do this, you will find that you are less annoyed, bothered and frustrated by the actions and imperfections of other people.

Put your smartphone away when you don’t need it

Smartphones are wonderful for so many reasons but they can also be incredibly addictive, distract you from the important things in life, waste hours of your time and can induce stress. Ask yourself now, how long can you go without your phone? 1 hour? 1 day? 2 days? Do you check your phone as soon as you wake up? Do you read your phone on the toilet? Do you constantly check your phone when dining with friends? Do you get anxious when your phone battery is less than 10%? If these are apply to you, you might have a smartphone addiction.

One thing I can be sure of, when I’m old and grey, and reflecting on life, I won’t be wishing I had spent more time glued to my phone.

Tips for reducing the amount of time you spend on your phone - disconnect to reconnect:

1. Turn off all social media notifications — they are not important. You don’t want those little notifications to be demanding your time.
2. Try not to sleep with your phone next to you — buy an alarm clock, if you need one to wake up. Also, there’s nothing worse than waking up in the middle of the night, and checking your phone for the time, only to see all your notifications and alerts, and then get stuck reading them!
3. Enforce a no phones at the dinner table rule.
4. Try to be aware when you are “mindlessly scrolling”.
5. Turn the colour screen off and go black and white. Colourful screens are very stimulating.
6. Put your phone away when you’re not using it. Try leaving it in the kitchen when you are in other parts of the house.

Be aware of your distractions and deal with them before they become distractions

Everyday we have endless amounts of information to process and the latest technologies are distracting us, we feel overwhelmed both at work and at home. This can lead us to becoming ineffective & mentally drained, we stop being productive & don’t fully experience or enjoy life.

Once you are aware of this, try to deal the source of your distractions - maybe that means putting away your phone when you are at work so that you can focus on work, or maybe it means not thinking about work when you are with your family - my tip here would be to maintain to-do lists that you can write out before you leave the office, so you know you can pick up on everything in the right order once you return to the office.

I would even recommend trying to complete your commute to/from work distraction-free several times a week. While I agree there is nothing fun about sitting on a packed tube or slow bus, and on some days, podcasts and music are the only way to get through it, your mind is still being forced to ‘process’. Every now and again, simply enjoy doing nothing, it will give your mind a chance to rest.