Stress that goes on for a long time without any relief is very bad for you. It can cause many different physical symptoms from indigestion and ulcers to stroke and heart attack. If you run a business or have work such as a business consultant where you are dealing with many different kinds of people and their problems, stress is sure to accompany your working week.
To stay healthy, it is important to find ways of reducing your stress. To do that well, you need to define what kind of stress you have.
- Emotional stress – this is caused by dealing with people who may be hard to get on with for some reason. It may be the boss who expects you to get through a workload that is too heavy. It could be clients change their minds constantly causing you to lose time in redoing something they don’t want or are not satisfied with. Or it could be caused by other employees that harass you or cause problems at work in some other way. Emotional stress from home can even cause your business day to be stressful.
- Mental stress – this can come from long hours of concentration on your work. Or it can come from not being sure you’ve given the right advice to clients. It may even happen that a client sues you for some problem they believe your advice caused them.
- Physical stress – comes from sitting for long hours without getting enough exercise. Doing lifting or other work your body finds difficult. Headaches, backaches or RSI from typing a lot can all be classed as physical stress.
So what can be done about these types of stress? Here are some tips that may help you.
- Many people find meditation and a regime such as Yoga very helpful in dealing with stress, especially emotional stress. You learn ways to stay calm, no matter who is hassling you. Report employees for any abuse, or learn to stand up to them so they don’t bully you. When you can stay calm, you can often find ways to defuse a stressful situation and you can think more clearly, resulting in better problem solving. You may want to look at more efficient ways to get through your daily tasks at work
- Mental stress can be reduced in several ways. You can take more short breaks to give your brain a rest. Alternate tasks from hard to easy throughout the day. And you can take out insurance against litigation in case a client sues you.
- Physical stress can be relieved by ensuring that you take breaks from sitting, typing or staring at the computer screen. Make sure your chair is ergonomic and suits your height, which include leg length. Retraining may enable you to change to a more suitable job.