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After you start working, you’re bound to face tremendous amounts of stress and worries when you’re in the workplace. It’s important to take care of your health while earning your keep, as money can’t replace a life. Here are a few ways for you to manage and ease your amount of stress at work.
Track your stressors
Keep a journal and jot down any important stress factors at work and how you deal with them. Record your thoughts, feelings, information and others on the incident that happened. This will allow you to learn from experience and not repeat the same mistakes you did before.
Develop healthy responses
Always remember to take care of your body because once your body starts breaking down, you pretty much can’t do anything. Practice a healthy diet and exercise often to stay in shape and stay healthy. Never fight stress with substances that are harmful to your body (alcohol, junk food, etc). You’ll feel better at the moment, but it won’t help much in the long run.
Establish boundaries
Work can be urgent, especially in today’s digital age where you can be easily on-call 24/7. It’s important to set boundaries for yourself, for example differentiating the time you actually work and when you get off. Set a few rules, such as setting a time when to reply to emails, no phones during meal times, etc. Try to avoid mixing in your home life and work life as you might create conflict between the two.
Take time to recharge
It’s not bad to take time off once in a while from work and give yourself time to recharge. It’s important to disconnect and avoid thinking about work during your time off and use this time to relax and unwind so that you’ll start feeling refreshed whenever you need to get back to work.
Learn how to relax
Find it difficult to relax? Find an empty room in your house. Start playing acoustic or relaxing music, close your eyes, and take deep breaths. Congratulations! You just meditated. It’s as simple as that. You don’t have to do anything too serious like go into a trance or anything like that. Instead, clear your mind and breathe. Don’t think about anything that you know might stress you out, like how much you need to do in order to finish tasks at work, or when’s the deadline for that huge project you have. Take time to relax before jumping right back into it and you’ll be able to work better with a clearer head.
Talk to your supervisor
Being transparent with your company’s upper management is also important. It’s compulsory that you communicate with your supervisor and find effective ways to manage your stressors at the workplace. Try to reduce strains and voice out whenever you feel like the workload is too heavy for you. Giving appropriate amount of evidence on whether you think the workload is too much for you will make your supervisor realise that and start dividing tasks equally amongst the rest.
Get some support
Talk about it. Don’t bottle it up and keep it to yourself because you just might explode in the end. Friends and family are the best support you can gather whenever you go through tough times, no matter how old you are. If they’re not around, then don’t be afraid to seek counselling. It’s important to talk about these kind of things as humans are social creatures and sometimes you need to receive advice and reassurance.