5 ways to ease stress

When the balance tips away from comfortable stress, it’s easy to feel as if life is getting on top of you. Try these 5 suggestions to reduce the stress levels and to shift your mind away from a worry that’s occupying too much of your thinking.

1. Go for a brisk walk

yes even if it’s raining, wear the right clothes and then walk quickly for 20 minutes. Make sure that as you walk you look around you to take in the world, and breathe deeply.  The action of moving your body at pace, and a change of scenery where you are seeing the world at work and  play will get your mind unstuck and lift your mood.

2.  Play a game

Whether it’s solitaire, or something on your Wii or PS3 with someone else or alone, half an hour of getting into a challenging but fun game takes your mind away onto something else, freshens you up and allows you to come up with a new way of thinking. Try this link to a free game of checkers http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/checkers.shtml

3. Volunteer

It doesn’t have to take up too much time in the week but helping a local charity, school or other group will help to take your mind away from the day to day worries and allow you the wonderful benefits of making new friends, learning new skills and opening up new opportunities. Most types of volunteering will produce positive feelings and here’s a link to a Press Association release describing some recent research http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5gYbaqsrGFjRXD9olpjfCq79je5cg

4.  Get creative

You don’t need to be a trained artist and it’s not about getting it ‘right’ it’s about letting go of constraints and the need to do something by a given time to some predefined standard. So try a creative art, perhaps take some photos on your mobile phone and then edit them on your PC, or get some pastels and sketch. Creative outlets without rules can free our thinking to the point where we feel more confident, happier and more able to deal with life issues. I recently bought some air drying clay and decided I would be a sculptor for the afternoon and it was great fun I made this and as you can see it’s about the journey rather than the destination!

Man thinking on nature - My first sculpture!

5. Talk to a friend

Yes this is tried and tested and the positive impact on stress of ‘offloading’ to a friend or someone close cannot be underestimated. As the saying goes, a problem shared is a problem halved. Speaking with someone about your stresses can open up a new approach you may not have seen before and you will feel supported which of course increases your confidence.

3 steps to improving your life balance

The frustrations of life often come about because we lack information or sufficient control over how we choose to use our time. In order to make adjustments to the way we use your valuable minutes its important to really know how we are choosing to use them now. Here’s a technique to start straight away which may give you some surprising information about your life.

1 Start a 7 day life log

This might seem like a big job but you need to keep it simple, a list and maybe a couple of words for each activity. This will paint a good picture of how you are using your minutes and highlight areas where you could save time by combining activities and also illustrate just how balanced your days are between the stuff you ought to do and the stuff you want to do. Just like a food diary, if you can see it all laid before you then you can start to see opportunities for more fun activities, improving the way you complete tasks and the things that waste your time. Achieving balance is all about putting everything on the scales and adjusting as you go.

2 Use three highlighter pens on your log to identify:

• Necessary tasks – such as work, paying bills and caring responsibilities.

• Time wasters – such as looking at junk emails throughout the day and channel surfing when not actually watching a programme of interest, there are lots more you can think of!

• Fun things – reading, catching up with friends, time with the kids

You need to be totally ruthless with this exercise, remember the aim is to get to know your life so that you can gain some control over your minutes.

3 Seek and change

List the time wasters you highlighted and pick one off the list to replace with a fun activity or a necessary one such as doing the shopping earlier in the week to allow more time for something else after. If you feel able maybe do this with up to three time wasters. It’s a gradual process and you can reduce channel surfing by half if that feels more manageable.

You can also list the necessary and fun things and identify where you can improve how you carry out a task to save time or increase the amount of time you spend on something you enjoy.

The key to this exercise is to feel completely familiar and present with how you spend your life rather than blindly frittering away your minutes and feeling more frustrated or stressed.

Good luck and do Let me know how you get on.

Work life balance could just be a life in balance

The term work life balance conjures an image of our lives split into 2 parts where work is an unwelcome intruder. Not so long ago it was a term we might have had to explain but now it is almost part of the package on offer when you go for a new job.  The term is an accurate one but the common perception maybe needs to change to allow a little more harmony.

The pace and commitments of modern living have pitched our income stream against the things that we deem really important such as family, interests and friends.  In generations past where work was normally nearer to home and within the community in which you lived, there would be a natural link between your lives and where you made your money. Now of course, commuting is the name of the game and we are increasingly spending more time getting to far flung meetings and conferences than we do at the event itself!

Expectations of our bosses, colleagues friends and neighbours means that we have to keep chasing the next opportunity to increase our income to appear ‘successful’ and of course to service that creeping debt we always thought would be paid off in a few months.  So the choices we are making are often driven by the gain to progress and keep up rather than by what might fit in with who we are, what we enjoy doing and the sort of people we like to be around.

Of course it is not practical to change what we do and throw in that boring stressful job, of course we have bills to pay and a life to maintain, but isn’t it possible to make some changes to move towards welcoming work into your life and achieving a better balance?

It is possible to make small changes in how we do things to start to make work feel a part of your life rather than something that needs to be balanced with it. For example, working from home one day every couple of weeks may not seem significant but perhaps you could go the gym or pick up the kids with the hours you save travelling on that day.

It is not always possible in many jobs to work from home, and in situations such as retail or call centres it maybe a case of exploring ways to work flexible hours or you may be able to find more creative work patterns where business needs allow.

Feeling like work and life are working together reduces the feelings of tension and guilt and allows us to be more present and happy in both.  Small changes to the way we commute, the patterns we work and over time aligning what we do with what we are passionate about can slowly create the sense of balance that we are encouraged to find.