In my last blog post, we explored the importance of single-tasking: The idea that you should spend time on individual tasks instead of having multiple tasks running in your head at the same time.
While it’s great to suggest this gently to everyone online, I’d like in today’s blog post to explore some ways you can refocus on individual priorities when your workday is spinning out into multiple tasks, competing priorities, and general stress.
Let’s go with the Three R’s of single-tasking:
Recognize
The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.
The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.
The only way you can deal with stress is to recognize it.
Am I getting through yet? Our day is composed of many small, varied stresses. Dealing with multiple e-mails, having ten browser tabs open, answering phone calls while checking e-mails, eating lunch at your desk, responding to e-mails while in meetings…
Good God, sometimes you must wonder how you can cope.
Coping isn’t the hardest part of stress. The hardest part of stress is recognizing it. In the last blog post, I recommended keeping track of your stress on a day-by-day basis, hour by hour as necessary. Find your symptoms - Do you find yourself going to the office coffee machine often? Do you distract yourself and take microbreaks? Do you get a lot of chatter in, and distract other people to make things easier?
Once you’ve recognized your symptoms, it’s time to…
Respond
Simple. Effective. Repeated. These are what your stress responses should look like. I’m going to go through three self-responses to stress. Chances are, you find yourself doing these already, but my guess is that you don’t use them regularly enough. Use them multiple times a day, and you will find yourself remarkably less stressed!
1) Belly breathing.
We’ve all heard the advice “Breathe in, breathe out”, but I’m going to ask you a basic question: Are you doing it right?
Belly breathing, or the practice of breathing from your diaphragm up, is much more effective at calming a stressful time. Train yourself to do it - When you find yourself clenching your teeth, speaking in rapid-fire sentences, feeling a flutter in your stomach, or getting fidgety, put one hand on your chest, and one hand on your belly. The hand on your belly should move, the hand on your chest shouldn’t.
Good. Now, count to five on the inhale, count to five, then count to five on the exhale.
This takes time. Time you could be using to do other things. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? You can use those three to five minutes to make a small dent in your work, or you can take those three to five minutes to focus on your breathing, lower your blood pressure, and give your brain a moment to do what it does best.
2) Clenching
Stress can be a physical response. You feel it in your neck, your jaw, your arms, your back. Anywhere and everywhere.
So, let’s get rid of it by getting rid of the buildup. Clenches are incredibly simple.
Starting from your toes, clench every muscle group as hard as you can for the count of ten. Toes, calves, thighs, butt, abs, back, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, jaw, eyes. Everything you can think of. Clench them hard, breathe through your belly, and count to ten. It’s especially effective if you can lie down while doing it.
3) Self-Talk
Whether or not you can believe it, the thoughts running around in your head contribute in a significant way to the stress you experience.
Programmers call it rubber-duck debugging, the process of going through their code and explaining the logic and process to a rubber duck, like you’d find in a bathtub. Saying it out loud means that they can hear and correct their thought process
When you experience the stress and anxiety of your workday, I need you to step back from your desk. Whether that means standing up and turning away from your monitor, finding an empty meeting room, or just going for a walk around the office, get away, and ask yourself a few questions:
- What am I stressed about?
- Why is it stressful?
- Am I helping? - Are you responding the way you need to, or is your response making it harder for you to get things done?
- What are some things you can do right now to help yourself?
Beyond the admittedly abstract practice, self-talk allows you to self-debug. Going through your thought processes to determine what you’re stressed about, whether your stress level is appropriate, and what you can do to fix it, will dramatically lessen the stress you feel throughout the day.
Refocus
Done de-stressing? Great!
Now your job is to figure out “what next?” Prioritize, and either tell yourself verbally or mentally what to do next, or write out a to-do list with as few items as possible - You don’t want to reload on your stress by seeing a vast list of things undone.
Take a minute and do these things throughout your day, and you will find a calm order to your life that may have been missing before!
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