Do you constantly feel on edge, anxious, and overwhelmed at work? When your job triggers intense stress, it can negatively impact your professional performance and personal well-being. The good news? You can prevent work overload from sending you into a tailspin with some simple tweaks.
Under all that work stress likely lies unrealistic expectations, poor boundaries, and some unhelpful thought patterns. Rather than white-knuckling through endless days of chaos, try these proven strategies to calm your nerves and hit reset:
Learn To Breath Deeply - Yeah, it sounds basic but taking full deep breaths stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system to counteract the ‘fight or flight’ stress response. Set phone alerts to remind yourself to take short breathing breaks. Just five minutes of deep belly breaths can reboot your system.
Identify True Priorities - The Eisenhower Matrix is the gold standard framework for parsing must-do important tasks from less critical ones.
Sort your to-do list into:
- Important + Urgent (Do these crucial time-sensitive tasks first)
- Important + Not Urgent (Schedule time for these)
- Not Important + Urgent (Delegate these if possible)
- Not Important + Not Urgent (Eliminate!)
- Doing this exercise brings clarity on where to focus your efforts. It also highlights things you can hand off or ignore outright.
Establish Communication Boundaries - Do you drop everything the second an email, Slack or text message pops up? That trained-in impulse intensifies anxiety and interrupts productivity. Set reasonable response times for different communication channels to take back control.
A rule of thumb: Emails within 24 hours, Slack messages within the same day, and Texts based on true urgency. Silence non-essential notifications so you’re not triggered to react instantly. And remember - a lack of planning on someone else’s part does not constitute an emergency for you.
Enforce Work/Life Balance - Contain your work hours by logging off on time, not checking emails at night, and maintaining weekends off. Using website blockers outside work hours also helps maintain healthy boundaries. And if you’re working from home, take intermittent breaks to move your body, stretch, do quick chores etc. The stimulus helps provide mental resets.
Adjust Internal Pressures - At many jobs, actual job security fears and manager expectations are less intense than we build up in our heads. Does your role require heroically fast responses or do you impose that on yourself? Recognize when you’re elevating urgency and expectations beyond reality. Talk to your boss if needed to right-size pressures.
With a few adjustments, you can keep work overload, anxiety, and burnout at bay. Prioritize breathing, clarity on priorities, reasonable communication expectations, strict work/life balance, and self-compassion. Say goodbye to white-knuckles and oceanic job stress - and hello to smoother sailing ahead!
Want to dive deeper into how to prevent burnout? Listen to this episode from The Fit Mess podcast for more insights, actionable advice, and tactics you can implement today.
