Category: Stress Management

Stress Management Tips for Employees Working Mom

Seven Tips On How To Stress Less At Work

Posted on August 9, 2017January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

1 – Control Your Reaction To Stress

Controlling your reaction to stress is the first tip on how to stress less at work. Your body’s natural reaction to stress is the fight or flight response. Internalizing this reaction to stress has major health implications. Have a plan of action to ensure a healthy response to stress. Take deep breaths and relax your shoulders to reduce body tension. Practice meditation and relaxation regularly so it’s easy to implement when needed. Take a walk as you brainstorm your response to a stressful situation at work. Working off some of the stressful energy helps reduce the impact of stress on your health. It’s also effective in clearing your thoughts helping you to resolve the issue.

2 – Maximize Your Calendar To Stress Less At Work

Identify the main projects and deliverables you are responsible for and block time on your calendar to focus on them. Ideally, schedule a recurring meeting with yourself to repeat every week. If your manager schedules over it or another meeting or project takes precedence, you are able to move the calendar entry to another time or day. Blocking your calendar also controls when you are available for meetings with your colleagues. Structure your day around when you are focused on your responsibilities and leave open the times on your calendar you prefer to attend meetings. Calendar blocking helps you to be more proactive with your responsibilities and increases your feeling of control which reduces stress.

3 – Start Your Day Earlier

Productivity experts such as Brian Tracy, recommend making the first hour of the day laser focused on your most important activities. Arrive at the office earlier than everyone else to have focused uninterrupted time to work on projects, deliverables, and training. It isn’t required to be in the office for this to be effective, consider setting aside an hour at home every morning to get a head start on the day.

4 – Take Breaks To Stress Less At Work

Although it feels as if you are getting more done, skipping breaks leads to burn-out and distracting activities such as checking your phone. Take time away from your desk. Try taking a ten minute walk, eating lunch in the cafeteria, or sit to read or listen to music. Consider using your lunch break to work on a hobby. It will help you to feel balanced working in an activity that is important to you earlier in the day.

5 – Improve Your Skills

If you are frustrated with your current position or feeling stagnant, learn a new skill. Find an online course or a class to improve an area you struggle in. Set aside time to read up on a certain subject. This is also a great way to use the hour you’ve set aside in the morning. Use the hour allocated every day or even set aside just one or two mornings for improving your skills.

6 – Prepare The Day Before

Prepare and organize the day before for the next day. Know your top priorities you’ll focus on the next day. Review your calendar for any new meetings you may need to prepare for. Draft out a plan for the next day to ensure maximized productivity.

7 – Establish Clear Priorities With Your Boss

If you are juggling multiple initiatives, you might be struggling with completing everything expected. Discuss your assigned initiatives with your manager to prioritize your initiatives and set expectations with your manager on when they’ll be completed. For recurring tasks you’ve performed for quite a while and aren’t sure they are necessary, consider researching if they are still needed.

how to organize your life to reduce stress

How To Organize Your Life – Reduce Stress

Posted on January 2, 2016January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

Learn how to organize your life to reduce stress and gain control. Having control is the solution to stress management. Creating a plan and systems to organize your entire life will reduce stress, reduce the overwhelm and keep you feeling in control. This control plan is a living document which you can continuously adjust and tweak to adjust what isn’t working and to evolve with you as your life changes.

Learning how to organize your entire life is a continuous work in progress. Give yourself time and patience to create the best systems that work for you. Setting aside one weekend or several days over a week to develop the foundation of your plan will create a structure for you to achieve your goal and feel in control again. This plan can be followed for both work and home.

Below are the steps on how to organize your life:

Define Your Life Purpose – This simply means be clear on what you want. This will allow you to plan your time on what is important to you. For now, define what you want to achieve over the next few weeks or months, so you can keep yourself on track and organized. You’ll focus on setting priorities, current obligations, and personal fulfillment.
Develop Weekly Planner Template – This is your guide on how you will spend your time during the week to help you plan and maximize your time.
Develop Master To Do List – Write down everything you want to accomplish and prioritize. This is your master list to organize your life.
Implement Your Life Organization Plan – Start following and tweaking your plan!

It’s important to know this is a continuous work in progress. Focus on having the foundation of these tools in your life. The content you place on these tools is ever changing as your life changes and grows. You may start with what feels like a draft of this plan. Implementing the plan is the most important part. With more soul searching, learning what works for you and life changes the plan will become further defined.

Are you ready to get started to organize your entire life? Let’s start with Define Your Life Purpose..

Create Your Own Outdoor Oasis

Posted on June 4, 2015January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

Have you dreamed of a space to unwind and decompress during the summer? You can create your own outdoor oasis by following just a few of these tips. We’ve collected pictures of a few spaces to inspire you to create a great space to enjoy.

Lighting:

What is it about lights and the way they make a space seem so inviting. Simply add some stringed lights and tiki torches to your patio to create a space to unwind in the evening hours.

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Colorful Fabrics:

Simply add some colorful pillows and cushions to your furniture on the deck or patio to create a more inviting and relaxing space.

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Keep It Simple:

Create your own private sanctuary in the corner of your yard. This idea is simple with a few pieces of lawn furniture, potted plants and screen for decor and privacy. Can you imagine relaxing with the feel of grass beneath your feet?

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Water Element:

Consider adding a water element like this adorable miniature personal spa. But if a spa isn’t your thing, you could add a fountain or pond to enjoy.

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How have you created a Stress Free Space: Outdoor Oasis of your own?

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recognize what you can and can't control dealing with stress

Recognize What You Can And Cannot Control – Stress Management

Posted on May 31, 2015January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

We’ve identified Control Is The Solution For Stress Management. However, it’s just as important to recognize what you can’t control. Sometimes there are things that are simply outside of our control. Have you ever tried to control other family members? Whether it’s trying to control their messy habits or their life decisions? It just leaves you drained and frustrated doesn’t it? This also can create quite a bit of stress in our lives. How do we handle these situations?

The first step is to recognize what you can and can’t control. The second step is to accept you cannot control it. You’ve heard the Serenity Prayer:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference”

Very infinite wisdom. There’s also another saying:

“There’s my business,

There’s none of my business,

And there’s God’s business”

Both of these have the same message. You should only burden yourself with the things that are your business or that you can control. The rest of the time you are creating stress for yourself that isn’t logical. You have no control, you can’t change it, it’s not your business, etc. Learn to let these things go and you’ll reduce your stress.

In the previous blog post, you thought about recent events that triggered stress. Eliminate the things that are truly out of your control. The only thing you can control in these situations is your reaction to them. You can lend a listening ear, you can offer sympathy and support, however don’t carry the burden of trying to fix everything for everyone else.

You may be thinking, but how am I to develop a control plan for the entire family if I can’t control them? Of course, there are some ways to control the family if your children are younger you can set rules and instruct your children to follow them. Then there are older children, husbands, and other family, friends, church demands on your schedule. How do you control that?

You can start by sharing your new plans with the family and encourage them to help with ideas and provide input. However, they may not want to box themselves in to a new way of doing things.

The only way you can control is to control yourself. You can lead by example and you can be true to your needs. Initially when you are building the control plans you will need to be somewhat flexible and test out what works for you and your family and what doesn’t. However, you will also need to stay strong to your new management and systems. Over time, you may be able to influence others in your lives to follow along.

For example, if you set aside a certain time in the week for your exercise and stick to it maybe other family members or friends will join you or will adjust their schedule around the time you’ve scheduled. Or the new systems you put in place to be more organized they may notice the difference and start to pick up some of those habits as well.

Next, we’ll start to build your Schedule Control Plan.

control is the solution for stress management

Control Is The Solution To Stress Management

Posted on May 31, 2015January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

STRESS.

What is the image you see in your mind when you see that word?

Is it a person buried under piles of paperwork at their desk? Or maybe it’s the vision of a face all twisted up with their hair tousled around as if they were about to pull it out?

Maybe you envision yourself driving around from work to home, to errands, and back to work again.

Regardless of the image you see, there is one thing we all have in common and that is desperately seeking the solution to manage stress. We all seek out the solution to stress looking for that magical answer. How many articles, presentations and books do you see on the topic of stress?

But before we can learn to manage stress, we need to understand what stress is. If we do not understand the underlying cause of stress, we cannot learn to manage it. So let’s take a look at what stress is:

Stress is an organisms response to a stressor such as an environmental condition or a stimulus.

Stress is your reaction.

So to manage stress, you must have control. Control is the solution to stress management.

Stress is a good thing. It triggers our fight or flight response. This is critical in a life threatening situation. But in our day-to-day lives, stress itself typically becomes a life threatening situation as it causes trauma to the body. This article is talking about how control can help us to avoid stress in our day-to-day lives. This helps with dealing with stress at work and at home.

There are two ways to control stress. You can control your response to stress or you can control the events that trigger stress. Let’s take a look at a few scenarios:

Scenario 1 – You have a presentation due for a meeting that’s starting in thirty minutes. You forgot about this presentation and now you have to think quickly and whip together the presentation in record time.

Scenario 2 – You’ve just returned home from work and your daughter has dance class. You are rummaging through the refrigerator trying to figure out what to prepare for dinner. After dinner, you are looking through your daughter’s closet trying to find her dance shoes and you’re becoming frustrated and angry. You may even be quick tempered and become short with or yell at your daughter.

Scenario 3 – You’re at work and a colleagues isn’t performing their part of the tasks on time causing your part of the work to be late. She also makes comments you find disrespectful to you in meetings. Overall, the two of you aren’t working well together and it’s causing you quite a bit of stress at work. You are irritated and frustrated and dread going to work each day.

Can you relate to any of these scenarios? Do you experience something similar? All these scenarios can cause strong feelings, increasing the heart rate, knots in the stomach, feeling angry and very reactive in this situation right?

How do you think you can gain more control in each of these scenarios? Let’s look at some ways to have more control:

In the first scenario, the first thing you can control is your response. Although you are in an intense situation, you can learn to control your breathing, take a few moments to calm the body and mind to reduce the impact of the stress on your body and your mood for the rest of the day. Another area you can control is not to forget about the presentation in the first place. Maybe learning better time management techniques will help you to avoid these situations in the first place. A control plan for your to-do list and work calendar can help avoid these situations. We will build a control plan in future blog posts.

How about in Scenario 2? This scenario has two areas of control opportunities. The first is a control plan – meal planning and activities. Within these control plans, you build systems to know what’s planned for dinner ahead of time and have a designated location for dance shoes. The second area again is your response. Yelling at your daughter isn’t going to make this situation any better. In this blog we will share techniques to help in this area as well.

In Scenario #3, you might feel there isn’t much you can do to control a co-worker. However, in this situation you still can control your response to the situation. You can also learn conflict resolution skills which might empower you to resolve this situation. Or if it fits, you can learn new skills and seek out a new opportunity removing you from this situation entirely. We’ll share more in this blog on both of these as well.

If you implemented these ideas how much different do you think these situations would have made you feel or which situations may not have occurred at all? How different would your life be if you were able to gain control over these areas in your life? On this site, you are going to learn how to gain control. You’ll learn to develop control plans giving you time management techniques to deal with stress at work and at home.

For now, take some time to look over the past week and identify the moments you were stressed. Ask yourself why you were stressed. Ask yourself why several times until you get to the root cause of the issue. Also, identify your response to these stressful situations. You’re looking for opportunities to improve your control in these situations as we did in the above situations. Where could you have had more control and been better prepared for the tasks at hand or where could you have been more in control of your response reducing the impact of the stress on your body?

Next – Recognize What You Can And Cannot Control

How I Got My Weekends Back

Posted on August 15, 2014January 8, 2020 by Lisa Hopp

After a long week, I would spend my entire weekend cleaning the house, grocery shopping, and other errands. I was exhausted, tired and felt taken advantage of. I was feeling empty and deprived of time for myself. Basically I was feeling robbed.

I dream of having the perfect house with everything in its place, but for now I’d just be happy with not having my house look like a tornado hit it every weekend. And I’d also like to have a little bit of time to read a book, scrapbook or write. You know actually feel like I had a weekend.

The first decision I made was to commit to doing a chore a day during the week instead of saving it all up for the weekend. I created a chart of tasks I’d like to ensure I do every day and added an additional chore each day. I print this out at the beginning of each week and place on my refrigerator. Every day, I consult the list for the tasks I’ve assigned myself to do each day and enjoy checking them off as I complete them.

As I’m working on this new habit of doing a little bit more during the week, I’m learning my expectations of myself were a little too high. I do not check off every item every day. Often times, I find they don’t need to be completed on a daily basis. I still keep all the task listed. I like the daily reminder of the areas I want to see clean everyday.

On the weekends, I’m happy to see I only have an hour or two of quick clean-up around the house and I’m able to enjoy feeling like I have the time to spend time on other things I want to do.

How do you make sure you get to keep a little bit of fun in your weekend.

Have Chair Massage At Your Next Golf Event

Posted on August 15, 2014October 22, 2015 by Bodywork Alternatives

Nothing like a chair massage after playing a round of golf! Here’s one of our therapists giving a chair massage at a golf event.

This is a great idea for company outings, sponsors, fund raising events, etc. After swinging the club for 9 or 18 holes, a few minutes in the chair will make a lasting impression on the participants.