How To Deal With Office Stress Like a Boss

Stress not only negatively affects our body’s restorative function, but also put us at a higher risk for diabetes and high BP.

Stress in the workplace has become the de rigueur. It’s almost like, if you’re not stressed about work, are you even working hard enough? That was rhetorical and a criticism on our times, in case you were wondering. We as a generation have already romanticized staying busy, and now we are onto romanticizing stress.

Stress in and of itself doesn’t have to be always a bad thing, but in our modern lives we are stressed about everything. Be it the daily commute, our boss’s anger, our relationships at home, how we are going to pay the bill etc. The list never ends.

They not only negatively affect our body’s restorative and menstrual functions but also put us at a higher risk for diabetes, gastric diseases and high blood pressure.

The bottom line is stress is not cool. It’s not good for you and your body and neither for your performance at work. The more stressed you are, chances are you’ll be more easily distracted, more absent and will turn in less satisfying performances. The good news is, it’s manageable.

Here’s how you can manage your stress better at the workplace:

Set Realistic Goals

Some days a big stress factor can be that you didn’t meet a deadline you had set for yourself. And while it is legit, you must meet your own personal targets, ask yourself whether it was actually possible to finish what you had decided you will.

Scheduling more than you can handle is a big stressor, and so is saying “yes” to everything everyone asks of you during the day.

Estimate, realistically what your day will look like including meetings and any previously decided commitments and then add new agenda on to your day. Eliminate anything which is not important.

Use a planner or an app to plan out your day and allocate time generously rather than scheduling tasks back to back. Once you learn to do this, you will realize you can actually do enough easily in a day without stressing. Just the management needs to be right.

Deal with what you procrastinate over first

Yes we all procrastinate. But there are reasons why we do it. Mostly because we don’t like the task, or we don’t know how to go about the task. The thing is, when we procrastinate, it’s still a stressor. We are stressing about not doing it, then when the time finally arrives to do it, we stress about how to do it.

So the best way is to deal with it headlong. Break the tasks into small manageable sizes, and what you don’t know how to handle, learn. Ask for help rather than deciding to deal with it later. That way it just becomes insurmountable in your own head.

Manage priorities according to urgency

If you are like most people, you tend to get the easier task done first. That’s all good, but how urgent and important is that task? If it’s either one of them, then okay, but if it’s neither than you need to revise how you go about your day.

Getting tasks done gives you a feeling of accomplishments and satisfaction. So if you do the non important and the non urgent tasks first, chances are you’ll be too zen and lazy to accomplish the more important and urgent ones. Plan your day in a way that prioritizes the urgent and important tasks first. These are the things you should spend more than half your day doing.

Eliminate Interruptions

With the way social media has taken over our lives, it’s no surprise that distractions are ever present today, be it emails or notifications. While we cannot control the interrupters we can control our response to it. Do not take the non urgent phone calls while working on that report, set aside a break time for yourself wherein you can respond to your FB notifications, and don’t look at emails which do not pertain to work. Basically you have to decide what you will respond to while eliminating all the other interruptions.

(Prachi Jain is a psychologist, trainer, optimist, reader and lover of Red Velvets.)