Tips For Managing Stress And Improving Your Personal Health – Part 1
Every now and again I’ll note a dip in enthusiasm in one of my executive clients and step in to provide some resources to enable them to rebalance and restore their natural state. We all know what stres feels like, and in the world of business avoiding stress means having a ‘toolkit’ of knowledge and techniques to help you manange it.
The process I have adopted is pretty straightforward, and may provide you with a resource for use with your own business team – or for yourself!
Real or Imagined?
That’s an inflammatory question when it comes to assessing someone else’s state of being – whatever they feel is real! What I am indicating, though, is the need to check to see if the root of the problem is physical or otherwise and thus whether low enthusiasm is a result of low physical energy or low subjective motivation.
Here’s a handy checklist.
Physical Energy Check
The following factors drive our physical energy levels and heavily influence our state of mind. In descending order of likelihood and priority, check:
1. Diet
Grabbing a bite to eat between tasks is likely to lead to using convenience foods from which nearly all nutritional value other than sugar and carbohydrates have been removed.
Using coffee to provide a neuro-chemical jolt to a body running on empty is likely to produce spikes in blood sugar levels with alternating highs and lows of energy and activity and, possibly, moods. Add a nice sugary doughnut or similar and you compound the issue.
Using coffee or any other stimulant as a substitute for foundational nutrition is not a good long-term strategy, but coffee or tea in the presence of a good foundational diet is one of life’s pleasures, and is likely to add to enthusiasm!
Planning meals to ensure a balance of quality complex carbohydrates (for slow-release energy) and protein (for cell renewal) is a good foundational step when it comes to gaining and maintaining energy (and enthusiasm) levels.
2. Sleep
Each of us needs our own ideal amount of quality sleep. Whether that amount is 4 hours or 9 hours is irrelevant; what matters is the “overdraft” or “sleep deficit” that we accumulate over a series of broken or short sleeps such as can occur when travelling or stressed.
Running overdrawn on sleep exacerbates your normal stress reactions to otherwise normal stimuli. Stress exhausts energy very quickly. Low energy can be a strong factor in low motivation.
3. Stress
Stress is a whole subject in its own right and one on which we provide separate and additional information so if this is an issue for you, ask for our free Stress Management Kit .
However, to deal with it broadly here: Stress is a natural by-product when planning is neglected.
It’s a bit like riding a racing car with your eyes fixed 10mm ahead of the front tyre. It’s exciting alright, but everything is coming at you so fast that all you can do it react in the moment, and there is nothing you can do to prepare yourself or lessen the impact of each event as you encounter it. Consider what happens when you lift your vision and start reading the road 500m ahead of you – everything slows down, you gain huge reaction time and you can plan and prepare for upcoming corners, dips and passing opportunities.
Driving your business enterprise with your eyes just ahead of the front wheels is not a good strategy. Planning and delegation allow you to “slow the world down” and to retake control.
4. Exercise
Your physical body needs exercise to operate at its optimum. Death is Nature’s way of telling you to take time to do this!
Rather than wait for the warning, respect the fact the in addition to a magnificent brain, you also have a (potentially) magnificent body (which, by the way, provides your brain with quality blood flow, high oxygen levels and the bio-electrical energy it needs to run).
Again, exercise and using your body wisely is another whole package of free information , but for now the basics:
• Sweat: 40 minutes of any exercise that generates a light skin sweat, 3 times a week
• Stretch: Flexibility in muscles and joints leads to flexibility in thinking and emotional resilience (don’t argue, it just does). Stretch before, during and after exercise
• Pace: Work at 70-80% of your maximal heart rate (220 – your age = max HR for age)
• Hydrate: Drink plenty of water before, during and after exercise, and aim at around 8 glasses of water a day
5. Health
Poor health will lessen your ability to sustain or generate enthusiasm; good health will create energy which will seek outlets in activity and forms the foundation of enthusiasm – or at least the fuel for it.
You check your car in for a service every year whether it needs it or not, but how about your body?
Find a health practitioner who is happy to assist you to maintain good health rather than to fix you when you break down. Try your GP, a good Nutritionist, Naturopath or highly-qualified Personal Trainer for starters.
Your health is your responsibility and is the bottom line result of your attention to most of the other factors here.
6. Recreation
All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl and Jack a dull boy. Dull boys and girls have no enthusiasm.
Creating and maintaining a work/life balance may look like personal indulgence to some of the more driven souls but even for them, it can be seen as an exercise in sustainability for their working life.
Your brain and body need variety of activity and focus. Whether that variety consists of a change of subject, pace, focus or activity matters little. If it can consist of all four, so much the better.
Recreation means re-creation; re-creation of energy, freshness, initiative, inspiration and ingenuity.
Include recreation for your brain in here. Simple strategy: Each month, buy one new magazine of a type that you’ve never read before, and read it from cover to cover.
Create a Bucket List today and start working on it. Don’t be surprised when your recreational activities start to throw up business opportunities – but don’t do them for that!
7. Renewal
Doing something other than work is recreation. Doing nothing – as in meditation, reflection, prayer, quiet time, me-time – is a little different, and makes its own contribution to your energy levels and enthusiasm.
If you are over the age of 30 and have not yet developed a meditative process for yourself, now would be an excellent time to explore the benefits of switching off periodically.
8. Relationships
Relationship issues, whether at work or at home or elsewhere can be the most energy-consuming (and therefore demotivating) issues that we face.
If you have personal relationship issues they have the potential to impact negatively on your professional life, not to mention, your health . Develop the knack of leaving them outside the door of the office when you walk through it and of not picking them up again until you leave.
Literally see yourself taking all of your personal issues out of your head, heart and gut and putting them carefully into a bag with your name on it, tying a knot around the neck and leaving it at the door of your workplace. Then go in knowing that here, at work, you are highly functional, positive and productive and that you enjoy the respect of and relationship with people with whom you are not deeply emotionally engaged.
Do your day’s work. Create good, positive results wherever you can, and take a break from your personal challenges. That way you get 8 or so hours of peace and renewal and strength building and validation – all of which will strengthen and sustain you when you leave the office or workplace, and pick up your bag of personal issues once more.
Do anything other than this and you run the risk of building your personal issues into your work; of failing to meet your potential there; and of being further debilitated and demotivated and de-energised there as well, so that when you finish the day and return to your personal life you do so in an ever-weakened state.
(Next Installment tomorrow)
