The Good News About Stressing Less
The Good News About Stressing Less
The way you feel, sleep, work, perform, and create changes to the better when you slow down and stress less
Nutshell Nudge
There is great stuff awaiting you if you allow yourself to stress less.
Everyone is telling you to rush, run and hurry through your day, your answers, your readings, or your conversations.
Your boss, the media, society, the market, and the competition is telling you that you have to hurry, to be smarter, more efficient, and better equipped for decisions!
You scroll through the latest news, skimming the headlines, quickly swiping through your friend’s slices of life on social or glance over the email subject lines that flooded your inbox in the last hour.
Does this make you feel better?
Or would you rather regain control of your time and not let the outside world determine how fast you do what to please everyone else...
We are responsible to many people and hopefully fulfill our obligations - but quite often we neglect that we also have a responsibility to ourselves.
Allow yourself to stress less because the rewards from it are not to be sneezed at…
Here is some of the good stuff that comes with stressing less:
Being in touch with yourself again
The good thing about not rushing and running around is that you are able to notice and perceive what is going on around you and inside of you.
“I had forgotten we are part of the natural world, with a need to slow down before we can really understand, know and hear what we need”, writes Libby DeLana in her book Do/Walk.
Being able to think ahead
With a calm and clear mind, it is much easier to think ahead. If you slow down a bit you are able to think beyond the tip of your nose, you can consider the long-term impacts and consequences of your actions and decisions.
Try to dance with your monkey mind as a way to always keep control over it.
Happy jobs
Research looking into what kind of jobs are considered the happiest, least stressful, and most meaningful came to an interesting result. Get ready….Here is a story from lumberjacks.
Jobs that are performed outdoors, preferably in nature and at a slower pace were reportedly the ones that made people happy, less stressed, and filled with a sense of purpose.
Forestry, agriculture, and logging have the highest levels of self-reported happiness, and lowest levels of self-reported stress and on top of it the people in those sectors feel like contributing to something bigger than themselves.
Forestry pushes you beyond the tree in front of you and gives you a bigger outlook because your work is living on.
And, by the way, the single most stressful occupation is being a lawyer. Very stressful professional sectors are, as the research found out, the finance and insurance industry, followed by the tech industry.
Without turning into a lumberjack, you can jack up your happiness and lower your stress level by integrating some outdoor and nature activities into your life.
Making smarter moves
The constant distractions through online interactions are stressful and hurt our intelligence. Here is a study from King’s College London University. They found out that when distracted, workers suffered a 10 to 15-point IQ loss. A 15-point deficiency takes an adult male down to the same IQ level as an 8-year-old child.
Making less mistakes
Lots of interruptions lead to feeling stressed out which leads to making mistakes. That can have unpleasant consequences in lots of areas.
Here is a story from the hospital sector. The Institute of Medicine reports that errors in administering medication can cause about 400.000 preventable injuries in hospitals which in turn amounts to an extra bill of medical costs of about $3.5 billion a year.
Yet, nurses at hospitals kept getting distracted since everyone is overwhelmed, understaffed, and stressed. Some nurses helped themselves by starting to wear bright orange vests with the message 'Don’t Interrupt', which resulted in an 88% drop in the number of mistakes the nurses made.
You come up with more novel solutions
We live in a time when many jobs are turned into non-human automated operations. So the work you might be interested in is the one that requires creative problem-solving, an innovative mind, and the kind of human humanness – all of which comes from focusing in depth on the task at hand.
Solutions, ideas, and creative output all need time to develop.
Getting more sleep
We are getting all those great tips on how to have a good night’s sleep by eliminating a bunch of stress factors before going to bed.
How about paying attention to the distractions that stress you out during the day?
Research at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that persistent interruptions and distractions at work had a profound effect on the overall performance of the subjects. It turns out that on a regular working day, we experience on average 1 interruption every 8 minutes, which makes it about 60 interruptions in an 8-hour work day.
All those interruptions add up so much that we never concentrate very well and constantly feel stressed. You take control over those interruptions and you feel and work like after a good night’s sleep.
Here is the good stuff about being less stressed:
Being in touch with yourself again
Being able to think ahead
Happy working
Making smarter moves
Making less mistakes
You come up with more novel solutions
Getting more sleep