Your body does not rank successful situations according to how ridiculous they are.
A genuine problem can put you under pressure. So can a printer refusing to cooperate five minutes before a meeting. Or losing your keys when you are already late. Or explaining something for the seventh time to somebody who is apparently experiencing the information for the first time.
Small stresses still require a response, and enough of them can make an ordinary day surprisingly tiring.
You cannot remove every deadline, inconvenience, difficult person, or badly timed problem from your life. You can, however, give your body more of what it needs to handle them.
Start with these five ideas below:
- Get Up From The Chair
Stress at work often arrives while your body is doing nothing.
You sit through the difficult call. You sit while answering the irritating email. Then you sit and replay both.
Get up.
Walk for a few minutes, stretch, or find a small reason to move. You are not exercising the problem away – you are just making sure that you don’t spend the next hour physically frozen in the same moment.
- Have a Boring Half-Hour
Not every spare moment needs entertainment, information, or productivity.
Give yourself half an hour occasionally where very little happens. Make tea. Fold laundry. Put on your favorite sweatband and go for a run.
Your body spends plenty of time responding to stimulation all day. It is allowed a period where absolutely nobody needs anything interesting from it.
Boring can be surprisingly useful.
- Give Your Nervous System Some Practice
You do not have to wait until you are completely frazzled before doing something about stress.
Some vagus nerve exercises, including slow breathing and regular aerobic movement, are intended to support the parasympathetic side of your nervous system – the part involved in recovery after stress.
Try building one into an ordinary day. Think of it less as an emergency response, and more as giving your body regular practice at finding its way back down again.
- Do Not Run The Day On Coffee
Coffee is useful.
It is not breakfast, lunch, and emotional support.
On busy days, it is surprisingly easy to keep working and postpone actual food until you are tired, hungry, and irritated by everyone.
Try to eat regular, decent meals even when work gets busy. Stress is already asking a lot from your body – there is no need to make it deal with an empty tank as well.
- Stop Replaying The Conversation
The conversation ended three hours ago.
Unfortunately, you have now conducted it another seventeen times in your head, including several iterations where you delivered an absolutely devastating response you did not think of at the time.
Notice when you are doing this.
Get up, change activity, talk to somebody, or put your attention somewhere else. The original stressful moment already happened – you don’t need to keep giving your body repeat performances.
In Closing
You cannot control how many ridiculous things will demand your attention before lunchtime tomorrow.
You can control some of what happens inside you.
Move your body. Give your brain a rest. Eat properly. Find something that helps you calm down again.
None of this will make you magically immune to stress, but it will help stop every annoying little thing from getting to you quite so much.
