Two months ago, I was super stressed. Both my well-being and my work performance took a toll. I couldn’t rest well and kept waking up with headaches. Day and night, I found myself fretting about things I couldn’t control. I discovered many things at my new job that were suboptimal and outside my influence to change it. In life, we were anxious to move to a large space as we were busting at the seams in our 2 bedroom 1 bath with two growing girls. Working at home all day made the situation worse.
Why Manage Stress
I noticed how much the constant stress affected my thinking and my peace of mind. I know I am not alone in how I react to stress. When I am calm, I am brilliant and wise. I enjoy solving complex problems and can disconnect once work is over. When I am stressed, I get indecisive and can get stuck in an infinite loop of worrying. It’s like half of my brain is occupied by worrying and I only have the other half of my brain to do anything productive. It’s almost impossible to focus or rest enough each night to start afresh the next day. Sound familiar?
Two Helpful Articles
This is why it’s so important to master stress management. While we cannot avoid stress at work or in life, we can learn to recognize it early and minimize its impact on our work effectiveness and overall peace of mind. There are many articles on how to manage stress. Here are two I recommend
- 8 Tips from Help Guide on the importance of managing stress and how to do it
- 10 Tips from Web Md to prevent and manage stress
Group Coaching Call on How to Manage Stress
While there are many tips out there on how to manage stress. It’s harder in practice than in theory. This is why I dedicated 35 minutes in our last month’s coaching call on this exact subject. Here is the first 5 min of this call + audio transcription below. You can listen to the full recording here inside the Soft Skill Gym. You can register here for membership.
From the call, the group also discussed five practical resources that you may also find useful.
- The Daily Stoic book. There is also a site. Thanks Alec.
- Meditation tool I am trying and like – Headspace. Also have a free Netflix series (You can also go to Netflix and just search for Headspace)
- Book by Ryan Holiday – The obstacle is the way. Thanks Dale
- Positive Intelligence – free self assessment – I am exploring this. The self assessment which takes 5 min is interesting. I plan to take the full course next week for 6 weeks. I will keep you posted on how it is.
- Can some stress be good – read more here
At the end of the day, stress management takes practice. The earlier you notice that your stress level is becoming unproductive, the sooner you can do something about it.
Audio Transcription
Lei: Alright. Let’s get started. So, stress management. It’s a topic that has been very top-of-mind for me, and so, I’m glad that some of you have chosen it as a topic to talk about. I have definitely noticed its impact on me in the last four or five months. And so, I want to talk to this group about: What is stress management? Why do we think it’s so important? Some of it may be obvious. And then, spend most of the time talking about: What does it mean to manage stress? I know some of you did ask for this topic, and I would love to start by actually hearing a little bit of context of why you’re interested and what would you want to get out of this discussion. I’ll turn it over to you guys first. Anybody want to jump in and share?
[Roshi]: For me, I know that stress impacts my life, and a lot of the time, it impacts my health. It really has direct impact on my health, and that’s why I would love to learn about how to manage it. Especially right now that there are no places to go work out and meet people, makes it harder.
Lei: Yep. Anybody else? That’s great. Thank you [Roche] for sharing.
Woman 2: I echo what Roshi said. For me, I don’t get to sleep if I’m stressed. Work stress, specifically. There’s a lot going on, and being exposed to more partners, more meetings, and when you have speak, that somehow makes me stressed. And then, I don’t sleep. And if I don’t sleep, that turns into the vicious circle of more stress and so on. So, I was just looking for some advice on how to manage it, how to step away from it, how to see it coming. Because if you can recognize that stress is oncoming, maybe you can stop it before it snowballs.
Lei: Absolutely. I love that you both shared a little bit about why it matters. The one that’s not mentioned is it actually affects our direct work performance as well. If you look in the past at when you were stressed versus when you were not, I would bet you could remember being in the flow and really high-performing when your stress is well-managed. But when you’re in a stressful situation where it becomes overwhelming, I believe that it actually impacts how you learn, how you listen, how you work with others, as well as how much you can think clearly about a difficult problem. And that actually has the snowball effect of feeling not on the game.
Lei: Obviously, the larger impact of stress is definitely lack of sleep, potentially health, how your life happiness is outside of work as well. But within work, there is also just a lot of impact. The same person with the exact same skills background when stressed can perform so differently than when you’re not stressed. I feel that as well. I mean, I was sharing that in the last four months, I’ve been stressed. And sometimes I can recognize it. Sometimes I can’t. But most of the time, I notice the consistent theme is when I am stressed, I cannot think clearly. That’s the best way I can describe it. Or I don’t think as many options. I can’t be as creative. You almost feel like you’re a little bit stuck. I also think that when you’re stressed, to a certain extreme, there’s stages of stress. When you’re stressed and you don’t manage it, it gets worse. It can become depressive and incapacitating. It can become, in a way, where all you can think about is the stress and nothing else, which then doesn’t help you do anything in solving any of the challenges in work and life, and so …
To find out how to better manage your stress, listen to the rest of the recording here inside the Soft Skill Gym.
Your comments: How do you manage stress? Please share tips that work for you or challenges you have with managing stress. I look forward to your comments
Your comments: Do you have an inner voice that tells you that you are not enough? Do you where it comes from and how to ignore it? I look forward to hearing from you.
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Lei