Top 5 ways to combat the lurking dark shadows of stress at work

Ever felt a sudden chill grip your spine, your confidence quiver, your heart throb faster skipping numerous beats, the pressure rise… your strength drain and a feel of sudden black clouds surround your eyes. That’s when your stress bar has hit its high. It has abducted you from your comfort, blindfolded your eyes and bound you with its compact dark ropes of darkness, mercilessly thrusting you to a side with its weapon of anxiousness, fear, disappointment and regret pointed straight at you with a grin on its face and a spark in its eyes…. Helpless, you signal your co-workers with signs of your situation trying to reach out for a hand to help, your plea to be heard and hope for the damage to be fixed. But you forget that you exist in a world full of judgments where this fear of being judged keeps you mouth sewn, your existence locked in the dark, damp cellar of your stress. Where you face this trauma daily and die a little inside each day.

This abduction generates numerous physical and emotional strains of depression, anxiety, eating/sleeping disorders and intense headaches. This dark shadow even follows one to work and since most of a person’s day is spent at his/her workplace we are going to look at 5 ways of challenging, overcoming and things to do in order to break free and reduce the production of stress at work.

1. Maintain Workplace Wellness

Your workplace is like your second home where you tend to spend productive nine hours of your day. It requires the investment of your mind, energy and time. It is essential that a workplace should provide sustainability to your wellbeing in order to balance with the hard work that you put in. Minimal efforts and practices can help maintain this wellness and help one function effectively.

Connect with your team:

Talk, share, and stay in touch with your co-workers so you can balance out the extra stress by letting it out.

Stay Hydrated:

Moderate intake of fluids, helps the brain function more effectively, balances the drained out energy and helps one feel restored. Less water consumption invites weakness, low blood pressure, dizziness and confusion resulting in lesser productivity, sadness and stress.

Go Green, keep it natural and diffuse good scents:

Study shows that greener work place is likely to produce lesser stress as compared to places that have no plantation. Psychologically the color green, having a shorter wavelength is comparatively cool and attracts more positive energy, produces harmonious feelings and helps one diffuse anxiety, keeping the stress away. Invest in indoor plantation or keep a plant pet on your work desk. During the daytime emphasize on the natural light. Save energy and let the beams of sunlight support your productive mood. Above all treat your nostrils with a scent that uplifts the mood. Install a scent diffuser at your work place that refreshes the environment timely by diffusing scents that gets you going and calms the mind.

Laughter is the best medicine:

What’s a more better way than to "giggle and guffaw" your stress away. Plan laughter gigs problem solving sessions at work to revive the mind, improve blood circulation and pressure resulting into employees feeling refreshed and relaxed. Laughter screeches in the ears of stress making it burst and boil slowly evaporating away.

Participate in Challenges and Activities:

Our eyes are used to spending most of their time glaring at the screens and our backs stiff from that constant sitting. All work and no play does make Jack a dull boy. A quick mind boggling activity serves as a motivation to put that brain into action and help build up strength to fight the stress away. A fun activity, challenge, Game-based experiential training workshops can be scheduled once or twice a week to encourage employees to work together and manage stress effectively.

2. Training & Development

It is a modern dilemma that the workers today constantly feel stressed, overburdened and are usually deprived of their sleep risking their productivity, relationships and their own mental wellbeing. Here is where the training and development programs help by analyzing the person’s core issues and providing a solution focusing on the development of necessary soft skills in order to help the individual grow and be the best version of themselves. Here are some tips on how managers can help their employees battle stress and manage it effectively:

• Conduct monthly stress management workshops
• Design wellness games and organize training sessions to work on employee development and wellbeing
• Balance work and break hours so an employee can have time off for themselves to exhale all that they are holding inside.
• Promote daily walks, exercise, soft music and healthy interactive discussion sessions.

3. Clarify & Organize:

In order to manage stress the basic key is to not over burden yourself with the pressure of stress. Learn to manage the stress by first identifying its cause, set goals and then organize your work accordingly, time management is the key. A step by step way to get this done is as follows:

Invest in Clarity:

Before you jump into concluding that you have been overpowered by the stress menace. Sit down relax and focus onto clarifying the main cause of it. List down goals that you wish to achieve, have a session with your manager when you sit together and filter out the excessive goals.

Keep a Calendar close by:

Always! Always, plan your day ahead of you. Plan it all out so you can balance your work with some time for yourself. An unplanned day is a devils pit and attracts all kinds of dark forces that lead to stress. It’s not always the work but also the breaks that you need to schedule and add to your calendar :D

A To-Do-List to get you going:

A simple solution to this beastly problem. Note down your tasks step by step and highlight the essential ones so you know how to get your day going and the targets that you need to achieve.

4. Prioritize and Set deadlines:

Smart Prioritize:

Always prioritize according to the goals that you have set. Don’t just prioritize for the sake of it. Focus and prioritize only what fulfills your goal.

Like they say "if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Do you really want that?

Maintain a limit:

Do not over burden or overdo your priorities. Fix a limit to achieve realistic goal limit a week and not mess it up. Remember to keep some time for yourself. You don’t want to end up in the dark cellar of stress being crushed under the pile of your "everything priority"

Set Your Deadlines.

Always remember if something isn’t due on a specific date it is more likely to be shoved around from time to time and be stamped with the label of "delayed". Keep your deadlines real and before you know it everything will get done without panic, burden and stress.

5. Get Ample Rest:

They say that the "The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep."

A well-rested person is a better performer as compared to the one who is deprived of it.

Sleep is like the Kings breakfast that is served lavishly and is an essential part of the day. It helps induce a better mood, relaxed muscles and a restored human mind reflecting positive beams of energy.

It also improves your problem solving skills and helps you fight stress way better than when your body is under rest or suffering from insomnia. You can’t expect to come to work thinking that you can battle the challenges when you have spent the entire night staying awake in the chamber of stress. If you’re well slept even stress is easier to battle away. Hence here are some tips to get you sleeping :D

Eight is the number:

Remember to get at least 8 hours of sleep before you arrive at work. It’s not a fixed ritual but it emphasizes that you get maximum hours of sleep in order to function properly

Keep a schedule:

Our body has its way of sticking to a body clock. Do not disrupt it. Try to fall asleep on the same time so the clock ticks right on time in the morning.

Manage your screen time before going to bed:

The addiction to the social cycle and electronic media has made it difficult for us to put ourselves to sleep without attending to each one of them; as the addiction grows, it keeps us going from one application to the other resulting in us wasting our hour over hour and loosing time out for sleep. Try to keep your phone away so you can rest your eyes and slowly get into the trance of sleep. It may be a little difficult to start with, but gradually things will improve resulting into a better peaceful sleep.

Stress really has its ways of building and breaking a person. If it is managed skillfully it turns out to produce various positive outcomes both in our personality and productivity. There’s also a strange fact linking to this, not all stress is bad stress, there’s space for some good stress at work too. Good stress helps one feel challenged, produce a motivation drive and makes you emerge out as a competitive individual. It makes you feel less overwhelmed, pressured and surround by fear. This stress induces a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction and relief. With a substantial approach, quality planning, great interpersonal skills and organizing experiential training workshops bad work stress can be managed, filtered out and dusted, leaving behind radiant polished beads of beneficial good stress.