5 Tips on How to Manage Stress at Work

by GFL Virtual Services | Oct 10, 2020 | Self-care

Before sharing the 5 tips on how to manage stress, let’s define what is Stress first.

According to Meriam Webster, Stress is a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation. Meaning, if not properly addressed, stress will not just affect you emotionally, it will also affect you mentally and physically, and in the long run, will even harm your health. So, managing stress is important.

Stress at work can’t be eliminated since it’s sometimes inevitable. No matter how optimistic your outlook in life is, there will come a time that you will feel stressed by all the tasks you’re doing, especially if there is a lot on your plate.

So, here are 5 tips on how to manage stress at work:

1. Start your day right

In order not to feel stress, you should start your day right. But How? Here are some tips:

a. Have enough sleep at night.

To avoid stress, make sure to have enough sleep at night, if possible have a 7-8hrs of sleep. Lack of sleep can affect your productivity. You will easily get tired and will feel grumpy all the time. Thus, making sure you have enough sleep at night is crucial. It will make you feel energized to finish all the tasks you need to accomplish, and you can function at your best when you have enough sleep.

b. Eat Nutritious and healthy food.

You should eat before going to work. Working in an empty stomach will not help you become productive since your body and mind can’t function well.

c. Be Positive

In order not to be stressed, start your day with a smile and feeling grateful for the day, not by negativity, or complaint, and it seems that you’re carrying all the burden of the world on your shoulder (I know, this is just an exaggeration).

How you start your day will greatly impact your entire day. So, start it right to end it right.

2. Be Active

The second tip on how to manage stress is to be Active. Allocate some time to do a 15-min exercise before or after work, or even just walk for a few minutes on your lawn if your working from home, or on your office grounds during breaks. According to MedlinePlus, improving your mental health and mood is one of the benefits of doing exercise.

3. Make to-do lists and Prioritize

Making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks according to their urgency and importance will help prevent stress. You will have an outline of what to do first and what’s next when you already planned out your day. Thus, being stressed on moving from one task to another without accomplishing anything, will be prevented.

Eisenhower Decision Matrix is a great reference when prioritizing tasks.

4. Delegate Tasks

The saying “No man is an island” by John Donne is very true. You’re not a robot, nor a machine that doesn’t get burned out from doing all the tasks when you have a lot on your plate. Thus, asks somebody’s help, and delegate those tasks that you identified on the above tip, which are urgent but less important so that you can focus more on the core ones.

Most business owners nowadays adapted to the new trend, which is hiring a Virtual Assistant to handle the urgent and less important tasks, so that they can focus more on the core ones (urgent and important tasks).

Time Doctor has these great lists of all the specific tasks you can delegate to a Virtual Assistant. You can also check my website and offered services here if you're interested to hire a Virtual Assistant.

5. Take a BREAK

To avoid being stress from work, you need to take a break in between. Even just to take a 10-min coffee break or a 5-min bio-break just to get away from your computer or the pile of paper works and to refresh your mind.

Managing stress at work is really up to you. If you will let stress consume you, instead of accomplishing everything, it will delay your work even more since being stressed cannot make your body and mind function at its best.

I hope you get something out of this post and let me know what you think in the comment section below.