No matter what you do for a living, most of us suffer with some stress at work, whether it’s because we have deadlines to meet, or we have sales targets, or we’re having to deal with a boss who’s a bully, stress comes to us in many different guises.
With that in mind, what can we do about it? Here are 6 suggestions to help you get through your day.
- Eat breakfast at home – I know, I already hear the cries of “I haven’t got time” to “I’m not hungry at 6am”, but really if you don’t want to get into a bad mood, or find yourself grabbing the wrong foods because your blood sugar levels have dropped, eating something that will keep you on an even keel will help reduce your anxiety. High protein such as eggs, or low GI foods such as porridge are the best two to try. Get up 30 minutes earlier if it is a rush, and no excuses. I used to work in the newspaper industry and had to be at my desk at 7.30am, I’d have to leave the house at 6.30am but would always get up at 5.30am to have breakfast. Eating it at work means you are not eating mindfully and that means not paying attention – the long slippery road to obesity.
- Walk – Now I don’t expect you to walk all the way to work, you need to get about 40 minutes to an hour every day, so if you do take the car, make sure you stand more at work and go for a walk at lunchtime, this helps clear the mind, increases dopamine levels, endorphins, stretches the muscles, so you’re less likely to suffer from bad back from posture. Stretch regularly and go and talk to people instead of texting, emailing or phoning.
- Is your boss a bully? Do they pick on just you or everyone? Bullies are not to be tolerated, if you are being bullied then report it. The majority of people leave their jobs because of relationship problems with various members of staff. It’s surprising how much of this is expressed subconsciously through raising anxiety. The more someone wants to leave a situation where they feel unhappy, the more the conscious mind suppresses the thoughts with ideas such as “this job pays well, don’t ruin it”, “we’ll be out on the streets if we flunk this one” and so on. So the conscious mind by trying to over ride the illogical emotional one can just make the subconscious shout louder.
- Practice mindful exercises at work. – This is useful as it keeps your mind on the present not the past or future, and helps keep the anxiety in check. As you’re sat at your computer breath into your stomach, so you push your stomach out. We’re all trained from an early age to hold our stomachs in. Shoulders back, chest out, stomach in – well it’s wrong, it actually promotes panic disorders. When we breath shallow breathes our breathing becomes erratic and sometimes when we try to chat with co workers we find our breathing becomes difficult, because you’re not doing it properly. So sit upright, breath in through the nose to a count of 5, pushing the stomach out. You may find you yawn more to start with. Then you breath out for 7 relaxing down through your body whilst you do so. Do this at least 10 times, try shutting your eyes too when you try it as it helps you stop getting distracted. Go off and have a loo break to practice it. And on your journey to the loo, you can practice mindful walking. This entails counting your steps up to 10 and then repeating, it helps keep the focus on the here and now instead of being drawn down the worry hole.
- Reduce sugar – when I first started work 30 years ago, we only ever saw a cake on someone’s birthday, now it seems to be every day. I first noticed this creeping in in 2002 when I worked for a short time at the Open University, this carried on at the newspaper, and even today at the GP practice I work at on a Thursday often has packets of biscuits and boxes of cake for anyone to help themselves, and it’s a bad practice. If you remove the temptation you don’t wear out your will power. The more stressed your cognitive functions are – and this includes just remembering phone numbers in your head – the more likely you’re going to give in to temptation.
- Get a good night’s sleep – It’s during sleep we consolidate our memories and empty our stress buckets. Only a few hours of sleep will cause havoc with attention and focus. If you drive to work, you may be in more incidents, creating a fear of driving, you might fins your memory beginning to decline – this is not age it’s the lack of sleep. Not sleeping is also the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but they still don’t know what comes first, the early stages setting off poor sleep, or the poor sleep ending in Alzheimer’s. Either way if stress management and hypnotherapy doesn’t budge it, you might have to try sleeping tablets. There are many out there that do different things, but before you pop of to the Doc’s make sure your sleep hygiene is healthy. Have a relaxing bath, read a book, wind down, don’t drink alcohol as it disturbs the sleep late in the night, and have the bedroom cool and dark.