When you’re working in the executive world, all your day-to-day actions are significant. Business leaders can be overwhelmed by a significant amount of stress. If you don’t take action to relieve your stress, you could find yourself experiencing a number of disabling symptoms - headaches, an upset stomach, chest pains and susceptibility to infections can all develop in response to stress.
Rather than being debilitated by a preventable problem, consider adapting these stress-busting tactics for your life. By learning to face and treat your stress, you can prevent it from overwhelming you, negatively affecting your work performance or inhibiting your capacity to make decisions. Here are five ways to defeat executive stress.
1. Learn to identify signs of stress
One of the first steps to tackle stress is to learn to feel it creeping up on you. Stress is most likely to strike during busy periods when you’re dealing with multiple projects at once, but executives might also start feeling stressed when business is going slowly or a fire has to be put out. Symptoms of stress can be physical, like nausea or a headache, or they can be psychological, like insomnia or hypersomnia.
If you find that your appetite is gone, your heart is beating fast, you can’t sit still or you’re experiencing unexplained pains or fatigue, you may be witnessing the first signs of stress. Even if you’re coming down with a cold or infection, you should consider whether your immune system was compromised by excessive stress. By learning to identify when you’re feeling stressed, you can understand what subjects put your body into this anxious state and when to combat it.
2. Walk away from your work occasionally
Stress can build up rapidly, particularly in a difficult work setting. If you’re dealing with a major problem that won’t necessarily get worse in the next half hour, feel free to take a step back in order to bring yourself some reprieve. By learning to incorporate regular breaks into your workflow, you can manage and alleviate your stress effectively.
Walking away gives your brain a chance to step back and stop throwing up alarm bells, allows you to think about less stressful topics and gives you a chance to refresh your attitude. Take this time to go for a stroll, eat lunch away from your desk or have a brief catch-up call with friends. Give your brain something else to think about for half an hour.
3. Reorganize your work flow
When you’re starting to feel stress creep up, it may be time to reorganize your work flow. By overhauling how you process emails, how you delegate and how you think about projects, you can help refocus your efforts on areas you feel aren’t getting enough attention and streamline areas that you feel are taking up too much of your time. This reorganization effort can improve your efficiency, making you less stressed and concerned about work productivity.
4. Start exercising regularly
Exercise is an excellent stress-buster. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with work, going out for a jog - and incorporating jogging into your regular schedule - can be an effective tool for reducing your overall stress. That’s because exercising releases endorphins, which help your mood. In addition, it gives you a chance to break away from work and enter a sort of meditative state, forcing you to focus on the motions of your body rather than whatever fire needs to be put out. Exercise has been shown to decrease baseline anxiety. Incorporating it into your schedule can help you take on the day-to-day challenges with more energy and less apprehension.
5. Make sure you get enough sleep
One of the ways you can unintentionally worsen your performance is by depriving yourself of sleep. Although you may be tempted to pull all-nighters and work overtime in response to stressful work situations, in fact you should begin amping up your sleep. When your brain is fatigued, your ability to make decisions and snap judgments in compromised. In addition, a sleep-deprived brain will have more difficulty maintaining a stable mood, which means you’re more likely to become stressed and upset when you’re sleep-deprived. By giving yourself an ample amount of time to rest, you reduce the pressure you put on your brain and ensure that you’re well-rested and in top shape when you are working.
As an executive, you’re going to face stressful situations. How you learn to handle that stress determines whether you can be an effective leader. By taking the time to identify and respond to signs of stress, you can ease your workload and make day-to-day life manageable.