Engineering and stress often go hand in and if you don’t experience some stress, you’re probably not doing your job.
The good kind of stress helps adrenalin to kick in when you really need to focus but bad stress is extremely damaging to your mental, physical and emotional state. You have to find ways to manage bad stress and here are some techniques you can use.
Identify your triggers
Try to establish what stresses you out. If you can find the root causes of your stress, you can attempt to reduce it. You could be feeling more stress due to an unhealthy lifestyle. Well-known ways to reduce your stress are eating healthily, getting enough sleep and exercising.
Self-care is very important and this includes having a work-life balance and taking time to do things you enjoy. You can’t work 24/7 and hope to stay healthy. When you’re healthy, you have a much better chance of managing your stress.
Even when you have a healthy regime, you can still experience work stress and you may have to look at ways to prevent your workload from stressing you out.
One step at a time
When faced with tasks that overwhelm you with anxiety, try to break them up into smaller steps.
Complete one step at a time and you will have more chance of success. When you only have one step to accomplish, you will feel less anxiety as you feel more capable of accomplishing it. When you complete one step, you have the impetus to conquer the next step.
Don’t allow your fears to influence your thinking
When you have fearful thoughts, you need to counter them with realistic thinking and common sense. Even if what you fear does happen, there are factors you can’t predict that may work to your advantage.
Your fear of an impending deadline may be keeping you up at night and causing endless worry. Then your boss comes in and tells you the deadline has been extended and all your worrying was for nothing.
Get your mind off the problem
At times you feel stressed because you’re stuck on a specific problem. When this happens, it helps to take a break and get your mind off the problem for a while.
If you have always relieved your stress by smoking but you’ve decided you want to quit, it may help you to take up vaping. Try out a starter kit from Vaping 360 and see how much more relaxed you feel.
Take advantage of help from others
Your colleagues may be able to reduce your stress by giving your advice and insight into how to deal with a challenge. If you are prepared to give and receive advice, the collaboration can greatly reduce the burden you’re trying to carry alone.
Take a day at a time
Stress is worse if you’re always worrying about something you didn’t accomplish yesterday or about what you still need to do to finish a project. If you can find a way to focus on the present, you have a great tool for managing stress.
You have to be able to leave the failures of yesterday behind and realize that half of the negative things you imagine happening don’t ever happen. You can waste an awful amount of time thinking about the past and the future instead of just facing what lies ahead of you on a particular day. Make peace with failures of yesterday and move ahead in a positive direction.
Last word
Managing your stress takes some practice but the more aware you are of its negative effects and find ways to reduce it, the more productive you’re likely to be.