Holiday Stress

It can get to the best of us. Your go-to meditation mobile applications can even be utterly useless. One of the best things that you can do for that stress is to take thirty minutes to meditate or just sit quietly and focus on breathing. You might say that you do not have time to spare around the holidays but if you think about the time spent in front of the TV, you should be able to find some time to relax. When you feel yourself getting stressed out, stop breathe deeply and notice how your body is feeling. Notice if you have tension or discomfort anywhere. What emotions are you feeling? The simple act of stopping and acknowledging those feelings is often enough to diffuse them. Sometimes they are like wild cats that just do not want the attention and run away. Physical activity is also something that is very important when it comes to getting rid of stress. Just take a quick walk around the block without any media in front of you or in your ears. It will do you a world of good.

Using the Hardwired to Fight Stress

Our biological stress responses have not really changed that much since the caveman days. Our environments, on the other hand, changed many times over. In the wild, there was a fight or flight response to stress and then one of the actions was taken which negated all those stress hormones and helped you return to normal. When you are sitting in on a video conference and are stressing out over the idiot babbling in front of you, punching your screen would not be the advisable way to handle the stress. There are things that we can do to work with the way that we are supposed to handle stress. You could get your heart rate up using at least a minute of intense activity. All it takes is a minute. Try jumping jacks or running up some stairs. You should also eat regularly to keep your sugar levels from dropping. Even it you are running from meeting to meeting, you still cannot skip a meal. At least try a granola bar to hold you over.

Hack Sleep

In the business world, if you are able to function on little sleep, it is seen as somewhat of an accomplishment. Studies by the CDC show that sleep deprivation costs businesses about $63 billion in lost productivity each year. The approach to this is to optimize sleep. Many large companies are investing in rooms where employees can catch some shuteye during the day. All it takes is a 10-20 minute nap to increase alertness and productivity for the next several hours. There needs to be the culture that sleep is not for wimps and that people should not feel that they are not doing their part. It is especially important for those people that are sitting in from of a screen with a software development project or an Excel spreadsheet that has no end. In addition to the rooms, there should also be lighting changes. Blue toned white lights can increase alertness and productivity so they should only be in the working part of the office.

Sleep Makeover

If you are having trouble with your sleeping patterns and they are keeping you from functioning at your best, there are some things that you can change in your daily habits. One of the things that you should do is sleep seven hours instead of eight. It sounds counter intuitive but there is research supporting the claim that you might do better with seven hours. Secondly, make sure that your phone and all those phone and cloud services are sleeping on the couch. The blue glow from the screen and the constant demand for your input will make it harder to fall asleep. Make sure that you are getting your workout in the morning and not at night. When your alarm rings in the morning, do not hit that snooze button because it will mess up your sleep cycle and you will be regretting it around noon. On the weekends you will want to sleep in but try to resist because it is all about consistency.

Increasing Mental Energy

Mental energy is important to have in any field of work but sometimes it can slag a bit. Fortunately there are lots of ways to keep that energy up. Do challenging brain puzzles everyday. Whether it is a mobile application or a trinket. There are many different apps and you just need to find the right one. You could also read something that you do not normally read. It could even spark some ideas to tread in a different territories. Not to mention that it will challenge you to think differently. You could also go and work in another place...right after a brisk walk outside. It can be stimulating and create new ideas. If you work in the same place all the time, it can get you to grow a bit lax. Do you have any other ideas about how to create more mental energy?

Things Technology Killed

Do you remember the suspense that was felt when you were waiting to find out the rest of the news story at 11 pm? Of course you do not. It has been so long when you could not know all the news whenever you felt like looking it up. Technology gave a whole new definition to news junky. Most of the time these days, you can keep up with the news as it is happening. What about the satisfaction felt when you slammed the phone down in anger. You cannot slam your phone down to hand up on that person unless you want to feel some regret about that very expensive piece of technology. You also cannot lie about trying to call someone and missing them or hearing a busy signal. Thanks to cell phone services, call display, call waiting, and voicemail, no one has missed a call in about 15 years. If you call someone, both your phone and their phone has disgusting, ugly evidence of the fact, and will hold onto it indefinitely if you want it to.

Eliminating Tolerations

Finding mental clarity can seem like a daunting task especially if you are running a business. Between all the video conferencing and using content management systems, that to-do list can get quite extensive. In A Portable Coach by Thomas Leonard, he says the key is to eliminate all tolerations. These are the minor annoyances that are not annoying enough to do anything about them but still can weigh us down. They can accumulate over a lifetime and start to clutter your mind. Time to remove them. Time to fix that blind. Time to finally organize the closet. The first thing to do is to mentally walk through your week and write down all those annoyances. Then take about a hundred dollars and an afternoon to address all of them and set up ways to prevent them from happening again. This will reduce the small stresses that sum up to equal one big stress in your life