Is work stress taking over your life?
YES!
Are you like some of these full-time working parents, who experience serious effects of work stress?
Leash. "I can’t relax well over the weekend and after work cuz different “individual work-related issues haunt me. I just feel low all the time"
Dan. " I just can't switch off in the evening so I feel I am working all the time. How do you cope?"
If you answer YES, to one of the below questions, you might be experiencing chronic work stress.
Are you dreading going to work after the weekend, in the morning, or after a holiday?
Are you always stressed and ruminating on work tasks even when not working?
Are you revivifying a work day or conversations you had?
Are you taking feelings from work home with you?
Does anxiety about work never cease?
Do you feel like you are working all the time?
If you feel like your work is taking over your life, it might be just that. Even when a situation feels desperate, there are very effective things you can do to help yourself to deal with work stress and stop it from overtaking your life
Please, remember this, if you can create stress, you can uncreate it. As you can load up your nervous system with stress, you can unload it.
Your brain and your body are excellent at unloading stress if you let them work for you. The best thing is that they know how; all you need to do is be a good caretaker and take some small steps to remove yourself from interfering with what your system can do for you.
Truly, it is that simple. Do not overcomplicate it. It is about awareness, trust, and self-learning.
Here are 5 simple things you can do to get your mind and body to start working for you.
1-Awareness. Become aware of how stress affects you by tracking your emotional and physical reactions.
What exactly is happening for you as a result of work stress?
Are you feeling irritability, anger, tiredness, loss of appetite, and lapses in memory or concentration?
Are you experiencing any physical symptoms like stomachaches, headaches, or catching a cold often?
Write down the effects of work stress in a list.
Awareness allows your brain and body to concentrate on something and potentially start resolving those stresses. Instead of running away from your feelings and sensations, your brain and body will us pockets or times during your day, when you are not concentrating to start healing and rejuvenating you.
2-Research. Research the stressors, and make an inventory of stressors. ( explained in more detail in a video-link) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V53vHY2BwME
Make a list with 2 columns. Action is what happens externally, and reaction is what happens internally. "ACTION-Boss looks at me funny. Reaction- I feel low, weak, chest constriction." The brain is great at looking for solutions, and the body knows how to unload stress. But they can't do it when we constantly interfere with those 2 functions by concentrating our attention on rumination and repeating thoughts that are mostly general.
3- Track your thoughts. Ask yourself: "What do I have to believe in order for me to feel it?"
Look at the inventory you created and your reactions to stressors.
For example, your reaction to a boss's gloomy look is you feel weak or small. Now ask yourself " What do I have to believe about myself in order for me to feel that way?" Write down the first answer that comes. For example:" I believe I am not good at my job."
This is a contemplation exercise if you want to go deeper into your reactions. Chances are you will experience insight and a better understanding of yourself, your needs, and what's important to you.
4. - Find those moments. Find the roses and smell them, repeat by smelling them every day.
Find small moments, pockets of niceness and peace during the work day and enlarge them, make them big in your mind, and marvel at them.
A cup of coffee you have while on the way to work. Colleagues you catch up during the break. Don't give up as this exercise can be hard for one reason. Our brain likes to overgeneralize and by its nature; it is negatively biased through evolution, so your brain will fight you on this. It doesn't like to look for roses especially when you trained it to believe there are none.
5. Create a sentence mantra, that works for you.
This is important and can potentially push your brain to turn on its creative power to full blast.
A sentence that you create can alert your brain that this situation you are in is temporary and there is a better thing you are wanting. You are releasing your brain and your attention from ruminating the same thoughts, even for a brief time.
Recognize this, If the brain thinks the problem is constant and never going to change, it goes into total survival mode with one purpose to protect you. Survival energy runs on stress and you will be harnessing more toxic stress to deal with work. It is never a good idea to create more stress.
An example of a sentence mantra can be this.
Once upon a time, I was stuck in a horrible job: work hours were long, the job unrewarding, and lots of work for a little salary.
I used to walk 30 min from the train station to the workplace, and I was repeating this one mantra.
"Less work, more money, Less work, more money. "
I enjoyed the walk and I enjoyed the mantra. Now looking back I don’t have horrible jobs like that, I enjoy my jobs and work less for way more money.
A mantra like this is powerful and effective because it utilizes your brain's natural ability to search and locate the best solutions for you. But if your brain gets overloaded with stress-related data, it doesn't get to work for you.
Even if you have no idea what you want your brain to search for, make a brief sentence of a desirable outcome for you. Don't worry about anything else, just say your mantra with conviction.
The idea behind all these solutions is to give yourself a choice to either create an open system or keep dumping your energy and resources into maintaining a closed system that runs on toxic stress.
An open human system is more relaxed and open to new ideas. Such a system is able to retract your attention from places it gets stuck, get that energy out, and repurpose it for your better life. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
I want to hear from you.
What one solution to unload work stress you can start using today?
How does work stress affect you?
Share your mantra.
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