I look upon my methods for stress reducers as tools in a toolbox. This gives me a selection of things to choose from when I come across various stressful situations. I decided to classify those tools by the hours of the day, as they all have their place.

• 6 a.m. Use a pleasant alarm. Starting the day with your adrenaline pumping from being startled out of a sound sleep gets the whole day into a stress mode. Choose an alarm that wakes you up but doesn’t aggravate you.
• 7 a.m. Have your morning ready to go. As much as possible, put things together the night before. Lay out your clothes, assemble lunches, set up the coffee pot; not having to rush around will keep your stress levels lower.
• 8 a.m Get out the door with everything needed. For errands, I will put necessary items in my car the night before – not in front of the door where I will step over them. Packages to be mailed, books to be dropped off, items to be returned all sit on my front seat, and I don’t have to worry about forgetting them. Note this works because I have a garage — when I lived in a place with a communal parking lot I put things in front of the door. And stepped over them.
• 9 a.m. Plan your day. I take a bit of time every morning to plan out the day. I look at upcoming deadlines, appointments and urgent tasks to figure out where they are going to fit in. I also look at whether or not I have enough time to do everything, and start shifting things around if I don’t.
• 10 a.m. Check email sparingly. My email is a stressor for me. When my email program is constantly notifying me of incoming email, I am constantly looking at it, and then I don’t get to actual work. I check my email at work at the start of the day, 10 and 2. Home email I check once a day, and it no longer pings my phone with updates.
• 11 a.m. Limit instant messaging. We rely on an instant messenger at work to communicate among our team members in various areas. But when I am concentrating, I turn it off so that I won’t be interrupted. Since many of my colleagues use IM to chit-chat, answering the near-constant pings sends my stress level up.
• 12 p.m. Get away from your work at lunch. I never go into the work day saying “I aim to be stressed today.” But stress can build up without my really thinking about it (see “Boiling Water, Or Being Aware of Stress”), so interrupting the heat on the pot by getting away mid-day can really help. Even when I am working from home, I make it a point to leave the room where I work and do something else.
• 1 p.m. Limit interactions with abrasive people. We all work with them. They’re the divas, the know-it-alls, the backstabbers or the generally clueless. I feel my frustration level going up when I deal with these people, so I set buffers. I redirect people to voice mail and email so that I have the space of time to formulate a nice response that I can live with.
• 2 p.m. Keep your energy up with a snack. When I’m hungry, I’m cranky. And when I’m cranky, little things get to me and add to my crankiness. I find that having a high-protein snack mid-afternoon (even when my stomach is not rumbling, but I start to get tired) helps to avoid that dip in mood.
• 3 p.m. Stretch. A masseuse once told me that humans have a remarkable ability to store tension in their muscles. She also told me that to keep the muscles from “kinking” they needed to be stretched. Taking a few minutes to stretch arms keeps my upper back from getting knotted. Having back pain is a sure-fire way to make me cranky, which in turn feeds a lowered level for annoyance (see above).
• 4 p.m. Clear your desk before leaving work. Putting papers away, getting rid of garbage, noting where you are in your work and neatening things up has two benefits: it clears the deck for work tomorrow, and lets you take care of any loose ends that are urgent. I make notes as to what I need to start on so that I don’t spend time trying to recapture my mindset of the night before when I sit down in the morning.
• 5 p.m. Take some down time after work. I learned this one from my daughter. Abrupt transitions are difficult for me, so if I take a few moments after work to relax and unwind, my stress level goes down. I may listen to a podcast on the way home, and I try to have a cup of tea and a few minutes to enjoy it when I walk in the door.
• 6 p.m. Use a crockpot/pressure cooker to simplify dinner. Dinner time can be a major stressor. Few people I know want to come home after work and spend a few hours in the kitchen getting dinner ready. My crockpot is my secret weapon for workday dinners. I have a few standbys I throw in and dinner will be ready when I get home. I also have a go-to selection of quick meals in the pressure cooker that don’t require me having to start it in the morning.
• 7 p.m. Remove personal email from your mobile device. I didn’t think this was a stressor until I removed the notifications. I used to have my phone “ding” when I received an email. The trouble was that I then felt the need to check my email. By removing the sound and the automatic fetching of email, I check home email on my schedule.
• 8 p.m. Avoid bedtime stress with 10-minute warnings. Those people with kids know what a hassle it can be to get the tykes into bed. My daughter didn’t do well with abrupt transitions, so I kept an eye on the clock and let her know when shifts in activity were going to occur. 10 minutes before bath time I let her know she needed to wrap up what she was doing because she is expected to take a bath in 10 minutes. This virtually eliminated the struggles of getting her into bed.
• 9 p.m. Avoid media that makes you angry. There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world. The “news” is usually a rehashing of the same themes. If you find yourself shouting at the television, don’t watch it. Going on a news diet won’t hurt. If something really major happens, someone will tell you.
• 10 p.m. Turn off the screens one hour before bed. Blue lights right before can trigger interruptions in the sleep cycle, causing insomnia. Turning off the screens can help prevent the stress of insomnia, which feeds into the cycle of too-little sleep.
• 11 p.m. Have a bedtime routine to soothe you into sleep. Having repetitive actions at bedtimes can soothe adults as well as children. The same actions repeated daily gives our bodies and minds the signal it is time to ramp down and get ready for sleep. Again, insomnia feeds into a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation and stress.

Most of these things are incorporated into my daily routines. By using these tools regularly, I find that I am in a better frame of mind from the time I get up until I go to bed.

Have you ever been tense about something, just to have your kids misbehave? Have you ever been late and misplace your keys? Have you ever wondered about why, when you’re already stressed, the stress seems to pile on?

The reason is that we accumulate stress as we move through situations. Each additional stressor piles on to the original stress level and amplifies what we are already feeling. But there is a way to keep that from happening:

The 5 Ways To Ramp Down Your Stress Level

1. Be aware of your stress level. In order to prevent stress from getting out of control, you must be aware of it. Get in the habit of asking yourself how stressed you are.
2. Assess your stress. If you find yourself coming apart at the seams, ask why. Ask yourself if this is really something to work yourself up about.
3. Notice additional stressors. When we are stressed, everything will seem magnified. The background whining of a two year old can set our teeth on edge on a good day, but will be more difficult to tune out when we are stressed. Things you could normally overlook are brought to the forefront by your already amplified stress level.
4. Breathe. To back down the stress level, put a few deep breaths in between something happening and your reaction. This can be hard to do, but it is possible with practice.
5. React proportionately. React to the events as solitary events. The spilled milk might seem like a disaster after a really bad day. But it is, after all, only spilled milk.

What it really boils down to is the trite saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. If you can handle the additional stressors gracefully, you will be a less stressed and much happier person.

]]> http://gqkzq9xu.lauraearnest.com.dream.website/easy/ Thu, 05 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.simpleproductivityblog.com/if-it-was-easy-everyone-would-do-it/ If all it took were buying a facecream to get rid of wrinkles, no one would have wrinkles. There is never a silver bullet.]]>

A friend of mine made a comment the other day that struck me as broadly applicable. We were talking about face moisturizers, and a person (who sells a certain line of expensive skincare) brought up the miracles of her product. My friend looked her in the face and said:

“If all it took were buying that product, no one would have wrinkles.”

The same applies to weight loss. If losing weight were easy, everyone would be at their ideal weight.

It also applies to productivity. If all it took to be optimally productive was to follow system X, then everyone would be doing it.

The truth is, these things aren’t easy. The same things don’t work for everyone.

So if you struggle from time to time, remind yourself that what you are trying to do isn’t easy. If it were, everyone would do it.

One of the things I kept doing through the past difficult months was meeting with my Girl Scouts. It gave me a needed break to be with my three girls every other week. It also gave me a new perspective.

I didn’t suggest talking about stress management with my girls. I just had a momentary panic when I realized the planned meeting had been done two months before. So I reached out, and one of the girls texted back: “It’s AP Exam time. Can we talk about what we do to manage stress?”

I went with it.

(All of the names have been changed because I am dealing with minors)

Crafting

Agnes is a very creative person. She loves activities that involve creating things – even when it is something challenging, like sewing, or completely outside her experience, like woodworking. Her number one stress buster: origami.

She pointed out that it is portable, absorbing, and useful for decorating wrapped gifts. She had us each try making a swan.

I had them try a new creative task: spirograph. A staple of my childhood, none of these girls had seen it before. They had fun (and frustration) making patterns. (Agnes went out and bought herself a spirograph the next day)

Videos

Annabelle is an animal lover. She enthusiastic about the work we have done with the local animal shelter, as well as creating various cat toys for them. She also loves hiking to see birds and butterflies.

Annabelle’s top stress buster is to watch cute videos. She showed us her favorites: kittens playing, baby otters swimming, and baby goats hopping around.

Dorothy is our media child. She is always finding things to watch. She suggested ASMR – videos of people doing ordinary things. She particularly likes the tapping ones. (This spurred a lively debate about whether or not listening to chewing is relaxing or annoying)

Drumming/Dancing

Both Annabelle and Dorothy are percussionists at their schools. Both of them recommended doing hand drumming to work out stress. No drum? Not a problem. They did an impromptu rhythm on the table and invited us to join in.

From there it morphed into energetic free-form dance moves. They put on some music and we had a five minute dance-a-thon.

Yoga

We next tried a more sedate form of movement, yoga. I pulled out my iPad and we did 5 minutes of basic yoga, focusing on our breath. Agnes dropped out early, saying that it was making her more tense to not understand the poses. But the other girls kept on and learned how even some basic breathing and stretches can be calming.

Reading

I brought in my favorite book, Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read this things dozens of times. It is so familiar that I can lose myself in the language, knowing that even if I can’t concentrate, I won’t miss anything.

The girls also agreed that reading an old favorite, or watching a favorite movie, is a good way to manage stress. “But not if it gets in the way of studying!”

Conclusion

Working with teenagers on stress management reminded me that sometimes the little things are enough to relax. Simple crafts, videos, drumming, dancing, yoga, and reading or watching an old favorite can all work.

— Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash —

Doing research into stress is enough to induce stress. Looking at all the damage that chronic or acute stress can cause to our bodies is enough to make people want to crawl into their beds and not come out. But it is possible to make stress our friend, and Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, presented the talk on how from the TED stage.

— Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash —

Stress is everywhere in modern life. Some of it is chronic, everyday stress. And some of it can be extreme, brought on by situation and choices. Today I’ll look at some advanced stress management techniques that don’t get (in my opinion) enough coverage, but can be extremely useful.

I’ve used most of these techniques in the last few months, and they have helped manage my stress levels. While I can’t say that I was relaxed and calm all the time, it did help to bring down my stress levels noticeably.

Please note that I am not a doctor or therapist. If you are suffering from elevated levels of stress, I urge you to visit your doctor and get some help with managing the condition.

Advanced Stress Management Techniques

These five techniques can help you lower your stress levels. I’ve included additional reading after each one.

1. Find Something To Listen To

I find that classical music can calm me, and that listening to music from my high school days (and singing along at the top of my voice) is a good outlet as well. These were both go-to things while in the car.

I put together Google Music play lists with both types of music, set up a classical station on Pandora, and put the local public radio station that plays classical music at the top of my car radio list.

Additional reading:

• The Power of Music To Reduce Stress
• The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response

2. Make a Phone Call

My doctor ended up prescribing a low-level tranquilizer to combat my anxiety when I told her there were times when I wanted to crawl outside my skin. I didn’t like the drugs – they left me fuzzy. What I did find was that making phone calls to supportive friends was as good at lowering my anxiety as taking the pill.

I put together a list of trusted friends whom I could call at any time. While none of them were on the hook 24/7, between their various schedules there were always two free at any given time. I started making a habit of calling them any time I felt myself getting tense.

Additional reading:

• Five Ways Your Friends Can Help You to Reduce Stress

3. Be Normal

Stressful situations can be all-consuming. I found that being normal from time to time not only allowed me to realize that life was going on outside of my personal hell, but also gave me a break from the situation.

I continued to work with my Girl Scouts (because most teenagers are blissfully unaware of things outside their own lives) and would call friends and ask them to talk to me about “normal” things.

4. Escape

I spent a lot of time reading romance novels while I was waiting in the hospital. I was concerned about this behavior, because I felt guilty at this use of time. My doctor assured me that since I was still able to keep up with the basics, that escaping into the pages of a book for an hour here and there was a healthy thing for me for that week. (Notice she put a time limit on it – escapism can be addictive).

Escape can provide a break from the pressure and weight of the concerns facing you. As an additional plus, getting to choose something when most of your life is wildly beyond your control can give you a sense of independence as well.

Additional Reading:
(Since most articles on escapism focus on drugs and alcohol, I didn’t feel I could include those here since I am encouraging healthy stress management)

5. Be Who You Want

One of my high school friends lost her husband to a fatal heart attack a few months back. I’ve talked to her frequently, and one thing she has brought up is that “being the widow” was adding to her stress burden. There are often days when she wants to not have to be identified as a widow or even act in a certain way she feels people expect.

There is no right way to mourn, just as there is no one right way to behave when stress hits. Go with how you feel. As long as you aren’t harming anyone or yourself, shed expectations and give yourself a break.

Additional Reading:

• Stress Management: How to Reduce, Prevent, and Cope with Stress
• Stress Management

Conclusion

Five more stress management techniques: finding something to listen to; making phone calls to trusted friends; allowing normal to be part of your week; escaping into a book or television show; and being who you want to be can all help you cope with your stress.

— Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash —

Stress, either chronic or acute, can have major impacts on your productivity (see Stress Makes You Stupid) and happiness. Today we will look at 5 basic ways to manage your stress.

With the additional level of stress I’ve been living with during the past few weeks as my life completely changed, I’ve had to deal with a lot of stress. It’s crept into and affected just about every aspect of my life – and not in a good way. I’ve had to put many of these techniques into practice in order to be able to function in the past few weeks.

Please note that I am not a doctor or therapist. If you are suffering from elevated levels of stress, I urge you to visit your doctor and get some help with managing the condition.

5 Basic Techniques to Manage Stress

Most of these basic techniques are things we should be doing anyway, as a way to healthy living. However, when you are stressed, these seem to be the first things that fall out of the daily schedule.

1. Get Enough Sleep

Sleep is necessary to repair your body from the effects of stress. Sleep drops cortisol levels, which are built up by stress. The ironic part is that if you are stressed, it can be difficult to sleep.

The other items in this list can help you with sleep, but if you are having trouble, please see your doctor. She can recommend techniques and help – anything from herbal teas, behavior modification to a short-term course of medicine.

Further reading: 3 Signs You’re Too Stressed to Sleep—and How to Unwind

2. Eat Healthy

It is *so* tempting to load up on fat and sugar when you’re stressed. These foods give quick and fast energy, allowing you to fool your body into thinking you have lots of energy. But these are short-term solutions.

Eating a healthy diet, with lots of fruit and vegetables and plenty of water, can help give your body the long-term support it needs to weather the stress storm.

3. Avoid Sugar and Caffeine

For the same reason you should eat healthy, you should also avoid sugar and caffeine. Both lead to crashes after a spike of energy – and who needs to feel more tired when you’re already tired?

The other reason to avoid sugar and caffeine is that they both depress the immune system. Why risk getting sick when you are already stressed?

4. Get Outside

Sunshine and fresh air can lift the spirits and remind us that there is more going on than just our personal situation. Being outside – even if it is just sitting or parking further away from the door – can have a great effect on your well being.

Of course, you must notice what is going on. Being wrapped in your own thoughts doesn’t allow you to take in deep breaths, or hear the birds or feel the sunshine on your face.

Further reading: Come outside: the benefits of fresh air

5. Watch Your Breath

As a flute player, I am used to having a certain posture that allows me to take in full lungs of air from the abdomen (and not breathe from the top half of my lungs, like most of the people on the planet). However, when I am stressed, my shoulders slump and I stop being able to breathe well.

Taking in full breaths is calming; breathing shallower makes you breathe more rapidly and convinces your body you are stressed.

Further reading: Stress Management: Breathing Exercises for Relaxation

Summary

Basic stress management doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. By focusing on proper sleep and eating well, limiting sugar and caffeine, getting outside and breathing properly, you can ease some of the stress.

–Photo by Pim Chu on Unsplash–

Stress, the flight or flight response, is a necessary part of being human. It’s what kept us from being eaten by things in the distant past. There are a whole lot of physical changes that occur while stressed, but there are also mental changes as well.

Most of us don’t have to worry about being dinner for some hungry animal these days, and yet, the stress response is alive and well.

In the past week, I’ve heard from three different sources that “stress makes you stupid.” Given my recent experience with extreme stress and the brain fog that went with it, I have to agree, and so I wanted to look into this phenomena as well as give some tips to get through it.

Anecdotal Evidence

While my life was shifting around rapidly and my husband was in the hospital, I was under a great deal of stress. My body was in primal survival mode: my blood pressure skyrocketed; I didn’t want to eat due to stomach distress; I couldn’t sleep; and I was sweating like I had done a marathon kickboxing session.

(You can read more about the signs here: https://www.sharecare.com/health/stress-reduction/how-body-react-stress-response

But I also noticed some severe mental symptoms as well: I couldn’t remember the most basic things like my parent’s address; it took two or three tries to understand complex issues my coworkers were trying to communicate; and at times I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin.

I did see my doctors about these issues, both physical and mental. I also urge you, if you are under extreme stress, to see your doctor.

Scientific Studies

There are a lot of studies out there about the effects of stress, both scholarly and more accessible information. Here are three that I ran across that I feel deserve a second look:

• • Robert Sapolsky of Stanford (https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEcdGK4DQSg)
  • Bruce McEwen (https://www.everydayhealth.com/wellness/united-states-of-stress/advisory-board/bruce-mcewen-phd-q-a/)
  • https://bebrainfit.com/effects-stress-brain/

Getting Around This

So you’re under a lot of stress. You’ve seen your doctor to help counteract the physical symptoms. But what do you do about the stupidity that comes with stress? What do you do about the forgetfulness, the inability to focus and the anxiety?

1. Write everything down

The best counter to forgetfulness is to write everything down. And I don’t mean on sticky notes or other scraps of paper that could be lost easily. Get yourself a single notebook and carry it everywhere.

Times of stress are not the time to launch a new journal system or start art journaling (unless it relieves your stress). Just get everything down on paper and refer back to it when needed.

2. Give yourself some buffer

Buffers are important because they give us room to consider. When you are stressed, you are reacting to everything…and reacting might not be the best response to a situation.

Get used to saying “let me check my calendar at home/office and get back to you” or “let me look at my task list at home/office and get back to you” or delaying send on email that you are emotional about. All of these techniques will increase your buffer and give you a better result than just reacting.

3. Let others help

During a very stressful situation resulting from a car accident, upon hearing my “no I don’t need any help” pointed out that by denying others a chance to help me, I am denying them a chance to not feel helpless in the face of the situation. If people ask to help, and the help is something that will lift a burden for you, take it. There are no points to be gained for doing everything yourself.

Examples of help you should take if appropriate: running to the store; bringing food; watching children; walking dogs; lawn care; doing the dishes; being a single point of communication about the situation for others; or even sitting with a person in the hospital so you can get out.

Letting others help not only relieves some of the stress of everyday things, but it also means that other people who do not have a stress-friend brain are taking on tasks and the tasks are less likely to be completed faster and with less mistakes.

4. Have someone double-check

A few weeks ago I looked at my client manager and apologized for missing something (thankfully not all that important) during a code review. I remember saying, “I just don’t know where my brain is theses days.” He looked at me for a few moments, shook his head, and said, “Do I need to remind you that you are going through an incredibly stressful time? Of course you’re not going to remember.”

We have a system of code reviews at my job: nothing gets moved to our production environment without it running through the daily process, and until someone else has put eyes on the code. This double-checking has saved us hundreds of hours of bug fixes. I also had my team lead sit with me as I selected a health care plan and explained what I thought was getting. Since he works for the same company, he was able to double-check my choices.

Having someone double-check important things means that you don’t feel the added pressure of having to get things absolutely right. Consider it a safety net.

Summary

Stress is terrible for the brain. It really does make you stupid. So counteract the effects of stress as best you can by writing everything down, giving yourself some buffer, letting others help, and having someone double-check you.