12 Ways To Eliminate Stress At Work

The average business professional has 30 to 100 projects on their plate. Modern workers are interrupted seven times an hour and distracted up to 2.1 hours a day. And four out of 10 people working at large companies are experiencing a major corporate restructuring, and therefore facing uncertainly about their futures. This may be why more than 40% of adults say they lie awake at night plagued by the stressful events of the day.
“People are asking me for answers,” says Sharon Melnick, Ph.D., a business psychologist and author of just released Success Under Stress. “Everyone feels overwhelmed and overly busy.”
Is there a way to maintain steady focus throughout the day? Is it possible to do everything that needs to get done and still have energy left over after work? How do you keep cool under so many demands? Informed by 10 years of Harvard research and field-tested by more than 6,000 clients and trainees, Melnick offers the following strategies to take your work stress down a peg, before it takes over your life.
Act Rather Than React
“We experience stress when we feel that situations are out of our control,” says Melnick. It activates the stress hormone and, if chronic, wears down confidence, concentration and well-being. She advises that you identify the aspects of the situation you can control and aspects you can’t. Typically, you’re in control of your actions and responses, but not in control of macro forces or someone else’s tone, for example. “Be impeccable for your 50%,” she advises. And try to let go of the rest.
Take A Deep Breath
If you’re feeling overwhelmed or are coming out of a tense meeting and need to clear your head, a few minutes of deep breathing will restore balance, says Melnick. Simply inhale for five seconds, hold and exhale in equal counts through the nose. “It’s like getting the calm and focus of a 90-minute yoga class in three minutes or less at your desk,” she says.
Eliminate Interruptions
“Most of us are bombarded during the day,” says Melnick. Emails, phone calls, pop ins, instant messages and sudden, urgent deadlines conspire to make today’s workers more distracted than ever. While you may not have control over the interrupters, you can control your response. Melnick advises responding in one of three ways: Accept the interruption, cut it off, or diagnosis its importance and make a plan. Many interruptions are recurring and can be anticipated. “You want to have preset criteria for which response you want to make,” she says. You can also train those around you by answering email during certain windows, setting up office hours to talk in person or closing the door when you need to focus.

Recommended by Forbes

Schedule Your Day For Energy And Focus
Most of us go through the day using a “push, push, push” approach, thinking if we work the full eight to 10 hours, we’ll get more done. Instead, productivity goes down, stress levels go up and you have very little energy left over for your family, Melnick says. She advises scheduling breaks throughout the day to walk, stretch at your desk or do a breathing exercise. “Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project has shown that if we have intense concentration for about 90 minutes, followed by a brief period of recovery, we can clear the buildup of stress and rejuvenate ourselves,” she says.
Eat Right And Sleep Well
“Eating badly will stress your system,” says Melnick, who advises eating a low-sugar, high-protein diet. “And when you’re not sleeping well, you’re not getting the rejuvenating effects.” According to the CDC, an estimated 60 million Americans do not get sufficient sleep, which is a critical recovery period for the body. If racing thoughts keep you from falling asleep or you wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep, Melnick suggests a simple breathing trick that will knock you out fast: Cover your right nostril and breathe through your left for three to five minutes.

Change Your Story
Your perspective of stressful office events is typically a subjective interpretation of the facts, often seen through the filter of your own self-doubt, says Melnick. However, if you can step back and take a more objective view, you’ll be more effective and less likely to take things personally. She recalls one client who sent a request to human resources for more people on an important project. When she was denied, she immediately got angry and defensive, thinking they didn’t trust her to know what she needed. Yet she never stopped to even consider there might be budgetary issues on their end. Once she was able to remove herself from the situation, she called the HR director and said: Tell me where you’re coming from, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from and then let’s see if we can find a solution. Ultimately, it worked
Cool Down Quickly
“When you feel frustrated or angry, it’s a heated feeling in your body that can cause you to react,” says Melnick. Instead of immediately reacting—and likely overreacting—she suggests trying a “cooling breath” technique: Breathe in through your mouth as if you are sipping through a straw, and then breathe out normally through your nose. Done right, you’ll feel a cooling, drying sensation over the top of your tongue. It’s like hitting the “pause” button, giving you time to think about your response. She says, “It’s so powerful it will even calm the other person down.”
Identify Self-Imposed Stress
“Learn to stop self imposing stress by building your own self-confidence rather than seeking other’s approval,” says Melnick. If you’re too caught up in others’ perceptions of you, which you can’t control, you become stressed out by the minutia or participate in avoidance behaviors like procrastination. Ironically, once you shift your focus from others’ perception of your work to the work itself, you’re more likely to impress them.
Prioritize Your Priorities
With competing deadlines and fast-changing priorities, it’s critical to define what’s truly important and why. That requires clarity, says Melnick. It’s important to understand your role in the organization, the company’s strategic priorities, and your personal goals and strengths. Cull your to-do list by focusing on those projects that will have the most impact and are best aligned with your goals.
Reset The Panic Button
For those who become panic-y and short of breath before a presentation, Melnick says you can quickly reduce your anxiety with the right acupressure point. Positioning your thumb on the side of your middle finger and applying pressure instantly helps regulate your blood pressure.

Recommended by Forbes

Influence Others
Even if you’re responsible for your behavior and outlook, you’re still left dealing with other people’s stressful behavior, Melnick notes. She advises confronting a problem coworker or employee by stating the bad behavior in a respectful tone, describing the impact on the team and the individual, and requesting a change. For example, constant negativity might be addressed in this way: “When you speak in a critical tone, it makes others uncomfortable and less likely to see you as a leader. I understand your frustration but request that you bring concerns directly to me, so we can talk them through.” By transferring the ownership of the problem, you’re more likely to resolve it.
Be Your Own Best Critic
Some 60,000 thoughts stream through your mind each day, Melnick says, and internal negativity is just as likely to stress you out as an external event. The fix? Instead of being harsh and critical of yourself, try pumping yourself up. Encouraging thoughts will help motivate you to achieve and ultimately train you to inspire others.
Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/03/20/12-ways-to-eliminate-stress-at-work/ 

Toward a New Definition of Stress

We live in stressful times. We are holding down two or more jobs. We are putting up with heavy job loads and unreasonable demands. We are swallowing outrage and frustration with unfair situations and irrational superiors because we cannot afford to be laid off or fired. Or we have already been laid off and we are struggling to find another job. Or we have given up and are coping with unemployment.
Outside strains like these are called stressors. Stressors are the barely-tolerable external pressures or challenges that bring us tension, unhappiness, and, eventually, problems such as anxiety, depression, and even stress-related diseases.
We all know people who hardly seem to be affected by stressors. They maintain a sense of perspective and a sense of humor. They remain calm in the midst of adversity and catastrophe.
But most people are overwhelmed even by a lesser number and intensity of stressors and tend to experience fears and anxiety, lose mental balance, and can evenually slide downhill, losing relationships, jobs, and even their mental and physical health. What makes the difference between these two kinds of people?

Inner Strength

While it may seem that our problems are entirely the result of the enormous stressors in our lives, the degree of functioning of our nervous system actually almost completely determines how we feel and respond. Which is better: to be exposed to few stressors but still be overwhelmed by them, or to be exposed to many stessors and respond with grace and humor? Mental balance, normal functioning of the nervous system, grace, and good humor are all aspects of natural inner strength. The important question is why so many of us don't have the degree of inner strength that would protect us from stressors and would allow us to express our inner creativity and intelligence fully, resulting in a happy, productive, successful, and fulfilled life. That is, if inner strength is natural and normal for some people, what limits it for others? What causes inner weakness?

Stress: The Stored Effects of Overloads

Stressors can cause overloads of the nervous system. Examples include the physical and mental trauma of living through a car crash, enduring the pressure of working at multiple, or difficult jobs, or even receiving a sudden pleasant shock, such as of unexpectedly winning a lottery, inheriting a fortune, or catching sight of a beautiful sunset. The fact that we can relive these experiences in dreams (when our body is relesing stress accumulated during the day) and that they can stimulate our fight-or-flight hormones shows that they have a negative long-term effect on our health and happiness. In this new approach we define stress as the response of the nervous system to stressors that are too large for it to handle. It is the internal result of external overloads. It consists of changes, or abnormalities stored in the nervous system that serve to protect us from repeated exposure to the same overloads by limiting our functioning or perception.
An analogy may help make this clear.
Consider modern buildings. Every modern building is protected from electrical fire by a system of separate electrical circuits, each protected by its own circuit breaker. A circuit breaker interrupts the current in the circuit whenever there is an electrical overload, whether caused by using too many appliances or by a short-circuit. In the absence of circuit breakers, the intense heat caused by a high current could result in a serious fire. If one or two breakers are tripped, the building still functions. One could run an extension cord from an outlet that is still working to where one needs electricity. It's not convenient when a circuit breaker snaps open, but it's much preferable to having a fire.
Like a modern building, we hypothesize that the human nervous system has a distributed "graceful degradation" mechanism that protects it from serious damage when it is overloaded. While we haven't as yet identified this mechanism in terms of anatomy or neurology, researchers can observe the very real negative physiological and mental effects of stressors on people over time, using measurable effects or markers such as reaction time, anxiety, trust, anger, memory, creativity, problem solving, skin resistance, EEG, blood pressure, and blood chemistry, among many others.

The Elimination of Stress

The only way to correct dead circuits in the electrical system of a building is to remove any problems like short circuits and too many appliances plugged into a power outlet, then go to the breaker panel and reset all the tripped circuit breakers. The natural way (actually, the only way) to eliminate limitations caused by stresses stored in the human nervous system is to remove the worst of the stressors (for example, by getting treatment for a medical condition), then expose the nervous system to deep rest.
This parallel between how an electrical system works in a building and how the nervous system works in the human body is fairly close. In both cases, dysfunctions caused by overload can be eliminated or reversed.
We know that the deep rest we gain through sleep is refreshing; there can be no doubt that it helps eliminate stress. But it is clearly not enough to prevent the loss of creativity, intelligence, and joy that seems to plague many of us as we grow older. And it is frequently not enough to reduce stress-related disease, or ameliorate psychological problems. As an extreme but apt example, if we have a traumatic experience, we may have nightmares for years before sleep finally dissolves the resulting stress.
What we need is a natural method of gaining deep rest that is much more efficient than sleep or dreaming, because the rest is deeper. Does such a method exist? The answer is yes, and it's called transcending.

The Recent History of Transcending

About 58 years ago, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, at the time a secretary and disciple of a great spiritual leader in India (Brahmananda Saraswati), was asked to travel throughout the world, sharing the ancient Vedic knowledge of effortless transcending with everyone who would come and listen. Maharishi was the first to cast this basic bit of Vedic technique into terms easily understandable by any modern citizen of the world. What emerged from his unexpectedly successful journey out of India was the formulation of Transcendental Meditation®, a seven-step course of personal instruction taught in TM® centers throughout the world. Scientific researchers were immediately attracted to this "new" technique as a result of their personal experiences and observations, and their hundreds of high- quality research projects generated remarkable results that have been published in many peer-reviewed scientific journals ever since.
We have learned from these studies that TM®generates a broadly beneficial and unique state of physiology that has been prosaically called "restful alertness", a state of rest that is much deeper than sleep.
More accurately, TM® teaches a simple, effortless, and natural technique called transcending, which quickly reduces the metabolic activity of the body, while very gently keeping the mind alert.
But Transcendental Meditation®, fortunately, holds no monopoly on this natural technique. Even though NSR© is taught in a very different way by a different organization, the actual effortless and natural mental technique that both teach is generic and identical (see description below).
The published NSR© research studies produced some of the same results as the Transcendental Meditation® studies, and our unsolicited testimonials describe much the same sorts of remarkably beneficial results, all of these results based on gradually eliminating stored stresses. We believe that this evidence suggest that NSR© provides a viable alternative to Transcendental Meditation® for learning transcending.

Transcending in Natural Stress Relief©

In only 15 minutes of practice twice a day, stresses that were incurred many years ago and that have prevented our full functioning are automatically released. Not only that, but the unhappiness, frustration, or tiredness resulting from our activities yesterday and today are washed away, leaving us relaxed and energized. With the regular practice of NSR over a period of months and years, ever deeper stresses are released, continuously providing the possibility of releasing yet deeper stresses. It's like peeling off layers from an onion. Eventually, stresses of which we were not even aware (because we were so used to them) finally dissolve, giving us the flexibility and virtual immunity to stressors that is natural and spontaneous in a fully functioning nervous system.
Source: http://www.nsrusa.org/about-stress.php?gclid=COXe5trA6cYCFYvHtAodIhcLSA