Some jobs are just stressful, such as healthcare, education, and business leadership. People say, avoid stress, prioritize mental health, focus on wellness, but when a certain level of anxiety is basically baked into your job description, where does that leave you?
The answer is a little nuanced. Even in jobs where stress cannot be completely avoided, there are ways to manage it effectively.
In fact, it’s through strong stress management that high-level workers ensure career longevity. In this article, we take a look at how to manage your feelings and avoid burnout, even in jobs where the pressure is always on.
1. Recognizing Your Experiences with Stress
One of the first steps in managing your stress is to acknowledge that you are experiencing it.
This is easier said than done, particularly because for many people, their experience with stress is so internalized that they don’t even realize it’s happening until it has accumulated to an unhealthy level.
In these cases, it’s important to think actively about how you feel at any given moment. What is your emotional baseline?
Sometimes the majority of stress-related symptoms are physical, which can make them very hard to recognize.
Does your chest feel slightly constricted? Are your muscles tense? Do you feel constantly overstimulated? These are signs of stress.
Similarly, if you regularly dread the idea of work, feel a sense of anxiety anytime your phone goes off, or notice that your sleep schedule has been disrupted significantly, these are all additional signs that you’re suffering from high levels of stress.
Recognizing that this is the case is an important first step because it helps you understand where you’re at and identify your most common triggers.
If you work in a constantly stressful workplace environment like a hospital, it’s only through reflection that you will be able to recognize what stress is incidental and what stress is deeply internalized.
2. Developing a Routine to Address Your Stress
Once you’ve recognized the role that stress is playing in your life, it’s important to develop a routine to manage it.
This can feel challenging because one of the reasons many people are stressed is that they feel they don’t have time for anything, let alone managing difficult emotions.
To that end, there’s an old saying in the world of mindfulness and meditation: everyone should meditate for 10 minutes a day, unless you don’t have time, in which case you should meditate for 30.
The thought here being, of course, that the harder it is to take care of yourself, the more important those activities become. It’s only through prioritizing mental health that you can avoid burnout and improve your emotional experience with the world.
Believe it or not, through routine optimization, you can significantly change the way you feel without radically shifting your personal or professional responsibilities. In the next few sections, we’ll look at accessible techniques anyone can and should use to manage stress.
3. Mindfulness
Mindfulness behaviors are any activities that encourage you to focus only on the moment at hand. Meditation is a very common method, but yoga, guided hikes, and other techniques can be equally impactful. The key is simply to clear your mind and allow yourself to be completely present.
This accomplishes several things. First, it floods your body with serotonin, the chemical responsible for relaxation. It’s important to remember that stress is ultimately a chemical reaction, and many of the most effective strategies for dealing with it involve reducing physical levels of anxiety in your body.
The chemical responsible for stress feelings is called cortisol, and activities that release dopamine and serotonin generally reduce it in your body.
Mindfulness behaviors also train you to adopt a more productive mindset, which can be equally useful in dealing with stress.
Much of human emotional discomfort comes from a past-or-future orientation.
Basically, when you’re upset, it’s typically because of something that already happened or something you think might happen in the future.
Rarely is the feeling you’re dealing with directly related to the present.
For example, if you’re lying in bed at 8:30 at night feeling agitated about the previous workday or the one that’s to come, you’re allowing the past or the future to ruin your present. Your negative feelings are not producing anything useful; they are eroding your sense of calm and peace.
Through mindfulness activities, you’ll get better at recognizing the realities of the present and allowing them to have a bigger influence on your baseline experience.
4. Practice Self-Care
A lot of people think of self-care as candles and bubble baths. While securing time for physical comfort can be a valuable part of a wellness routine, it’s not truly meeting any of your concrete emotional needs.
A well-developed self-care routine should focus on several key categories:
- Your diet
- Your sleep
- Your exercise
Basically, you want to make sure that your body has everything it needs to succeed. That means seven to eight hours of sleep, eating nutritionally balanced meals, and getting the doctor-recommended 30 minutes a day of exercise.
All of these activities will help reduce cortisol in your body and give you the energy and clarity you need to make good choices.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by your sense of burnout until you’ve at least optimized your sleeping, eating, and exercise habits.
They are reasonably simple adjustments, and they can make a much bigger impact than the majority of people realize.
5. Refine Your Habits
There are positive ways to manage stress and less positive ways to manage stress. We’ve already talked about behaviors that improve your emotional baseline experience.
These are activities that can very literally change your brain chemistry. They can help you feel better and facilitate higher levels of relaxation and ease.
Psychologists call this eudaimonic wellness behaviors that raise serotonin and dopamine sustainably while reducing cortisol.
There’s also hedonic wellness. Hedonic behaviors provide short-term stress relief but offer no long-term benefits.
This might include screen time, alcohol, drugs, and activities that are not necessarily objectively bad but are not considered good for you.
This isn’t to say that you can’t watch Netflix or enjoy a glass of wine or a legal edible. It is to say that you should recognize that every day has clearly defined limitations.
If you only have a limited amount of time, you should use it in a way that maximizes your mental wellness.
Reading will be more effective for your mental health than screen time. Meditation will provide longer-lasting benefits than even moderate alcohol or cannabis consumption.
In business, it’s easy to recognize and prioritize productive behaviors. Do the same for your personal life.
If you’re spending three or more hours a day on your phone, scrolling social media, or watching silly videos, you could probably find a more efficient use of that time. It’s a hard habit to break because screen time provides a very quick dopamine response.
If you’re trying to immediately reduce stress, this will be more effective than, say, a jog, a hike, or a few minutes sitting cross-legged on the floor focused on your breathing.
But if you prioritize eudaimonic wellness every day for weeks, months, and then years, you’ll find that over time, your emotional experience improves considerably and in a much more sustainable direction.
6. Recognizing When the Stress is Too Much
Changing your behaviors and developing healthy habits is great. That said, at a certain point, you also have to consider whether the job you’ve chosen is the right fit for you.
If you feel like most of your free time is going into habits and behaviors that make your professional time tolerable, it might indicate that you’re doing a job you don’t actually like. Life is too short to be miserable for 40 hours a week.
If you are always stressed and approaching burnout, even after you’ve adjusted your habits or if you’ve simply realized that you’re not happy at work, it may be time to explore another career.
For example, many nurses who feel burnt out on the hospital floor will pivot into a speciality field.
There are so many rewarding ways to spend your time. Pivot into a job that doesn’t make you miserable.
