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Tools That Eliminate Stress At The Office

By Carlos Herramenta

In today's workplace stress is as much a part of modern life as breathing. How you handle stress can improve your situation or make matters worse. Even if you work hard at minimizing the stress you experience at the office, there are tools that you can use that will help your productivity and attitude for handling the stress.

Stress at work can affect performance, memory and health. According to MindTools (http://www.mindtools.com), stress is "a condition of feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize". The natural tool that your body wants to use in response to stress is the "fight-or-flight" response. When you perceive a stressor, your body's hormones kick in and want you to either move faster or shut down. By retraining yourself to remain under control, you respond better to stressful situations. If you practice tools to achieve this state, you are much calmer and rational when situations are highly stressful. Without a conscious effort on your part, you may over-react to small levels of stress and could experience burnout, excitability, irritability and health problems.

However, you can retrain your thought processes to maintain a calmer state when minor stressors cross your path. Some tips from stress reduction experts include the following:

1. Stress Management Training - These classes allow you to role play stressful situations and devise strategies for handling or eliminating stressful them.

2. Setting Limits - In order to set limits, you must first understand what your capabilities are. Once you know what you can reasonably accomplish you can limit what you promise to get done.

3. Identify The Source - Is the stress actually coming from the outside world or are you magnifying the problem internally. If your boss reminds you of how you felt as a child trying to please an alcoholic parent, much of stress you feel is internally produced and may not be your boss at all.

4. Face The Source - Without confrontation, discuss with any person who is the source of your stress how to resolve the situation. If need be, have a good discussion with yourself about eliminating stress.

5. Remain Positive - Outwardly, you have the ability to elect to react to stress anyway you want. You don't have to give up your control. Rather than procrastinating and waiting for stress to resolve itself, elect to be proactive and make yourself a better person as result.

6. Eliminate Clutter - The first type of clutter you may think of is physical clutter. Keeping your office area organized does help to reduce stress. Another type of clutter is in the mind. When you are working on a task focus only on it rather than being distracted by lesser tasks that you need to do later.

7. Practice Soothing Exercises - For example, try taking a deep breath to restore normal levels of oxygen to your brain or taking a walk outside at lunchtime. Remember to drink plenty of water during the day to keep your body hydrated.

Daily stress is inevitable but you don't need to feel stressed as much as you do. Using these few simple tools you can manage the stressful feelings and handle your daily workload with a positive attitude.

About the Author:
Carlos Herramenta is the owner and operator of F Tool Box which is a principal source of information about tools and toolboxes on the internet. Instant access to his archive of articles is just a click away: http://www.ftoolbox.com/newsletters/.

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