By learning how to manage your stress, you not only avoid burnout but also enhance your ability to work smarter. Incorporating simple hacks in your daily routine can help reduce anxiety and boost focus without getting overwhelmed in your life.
In this article, we provide you with real-world tips and tools, including time-saving techniques, virtual support, and other adjustments to your routines to keep stress levels well within your control. We will then show you how a virtual assistant service like Wing can ease your burden and help you reclaim your sanity.
Why Stress Management Matters?
While you might feel like you're pushing productive boundaries, unchecked stress exacts a heavy price, both personally and professionally. Research has shown an inverse link between stress and productivity, where an increase in stress decreases productivity substantially. Not just that, prolonged stress can affect your mental and physical health, and ultimately, productivity takes a hit, together with your decision-making capacity.
The APA highlighted that 77% of individuals suffer from fatigue, headaches, and sleep issues, all of which are physical symptoms of stress.
Entrepreneurs and remote workers are faced with a tough balancing act as they juggle multiple roles at a time. Failing to manage stress affects:
- Cognitive clarity: Your focus is impaired, which leads to foggy decision-making
- Emotional resilienc: You display emotional outbursts instead of a rational approach when things go wrong.
- Leadership: You find it difficult to motivate teams or manage conflicting situations.
Harvard Business Review study reported that executives under pressure are more prone to making reactive choices rather than strategic decisions. You can hardly expect to think to your best potential when your mind is in survival mode.
5 Stress Management Relief Hacks
The biggest question is how to stay calm under pressure?
Here are some of the effective stress relief hacks you can easily implement in your workdays to reduce stress at work.
1. Box Breathing (4-4-4-4 Method)
This breathing technique is endorsed by Navy Seals and works to reset your nervous system:
It involves four main steps;
- Inhaling for 4 seconds
- Holding for 4 seconds
- Exhaling for 4 seconds
- Holding for 4 seconds
You need to repeat the series of steps for 2–3 minutes, and you will end up feeling calmer, sharper, and in sync with yourself.
2. 5-Minute Mindfulness Break
At times, all you need is to feel fully alive. In order to practice mindfulness, you can use a meditation app like Headspace or Calm, close your tabs, and just be. This can help reduce cortisol levels produced due to stress and enhance your powers of concentration when you get back to work.
3. The Eisenhower Matrix
Constant pressure to make decisions, big or small, can leave you mentally exhausted. A good way to tackle decision fatigue is to divide your tasks into the following four categories based on their priorities.
- Urgent and Important
- Important but Not Urgent
- Urgent but Not Important
- Neither
This helps you focus on what truly matters and delegate the rest.
4. Maintain a Gratitude Journal
Most stress comes from a place where we are either not content with the present course of life or anxious about the future. Being grateful for how far you have come or achieved so far can help ward off unnecessary stress. Gratitude, too, comes with practice.
Jot down 3 things you’re grateful for each morning and evening. It conditions your brain to focus on the positive, not to give in to the pressure.
5. Ditch Screen Swaps Take Real Breaks
This is by far the simplest yet most abused of all hacks. Unfortunately, break has lost its original purpose and has been reduced to scrolling social media on your phone. A true break means unwinding yourself through stepping out of your workspace, stretching yourself a little, and taking deep breaths.
What your brain needs is some form of sensory variation to recharge itself, not more means of stimulation.
Bonus Hack: You can keep sticky notes or set app notifications to remind you to take breaks at intervals.
Time Management as a Stress Solution
Stress should be seen as a symptom, and more often, the cause is poor time allocation. The fear of losing out on deadlines can drive stress, and that’s where effective time and stress management tips come in handy. Their goal is to equip you with skills to organize your day with purpose so that you don’t end up feeling anxious.
To understand how, let's first explore why time mismanagement often creates stress
- You feel behind before the day starts
- You switch from one task to another, decreasing output
- You waste mental energy deciding “what’s next?”
Try These Proven Techniques
- Time Blocking: Dedicate specific time slots to tasks. This can minimize a tendency to multitask and instead build focused work sprints.
- Pomodoro Method: This comprises 25 minutes of work + 5-minute break, which equals higher focus and less burnout.
- Task Batching: By grouping similar activities such as emails, admin, and calls, you can sustain your focus and lessen context switching.
Beyond these tips, let’s talk about the real game-changer.
Outsource to Free Your Brain
When you are running on a tight schedule, the worst thing you can do is to do everything yourself, from cleaning up your inbox to taking calls to fulfilling admin duties. By doing this, you’re burning valuable creative energy, which you can recover by Outsourcing.
This involves delegating mundane or time-consuming tasks to third-party services like Wing Assistant that can free up both your time and energy to focus on the big picture.
How Wing Assistant Helps Reduce Stress?
So, you must be wondering what Wing Assistant is and what it can do for managing everyday stress. Well, it’s a dedicated virtual assistant service that specializes in handling routine but essential tasks so you don’t have to.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, a team leader, or a busy remote worker, Wing helps reduce your work stress by helping you manage your time like a pro. It can handle a wide variety of work on your behalf, like
- Calendar Management, which means no more ping-pong with your schedule
- Email Inbox Management enables you to clear the clutter and give priority to what matters
- WingAssistant cuts through the noise to bring you the latest market insights and data you need effortlessly.
- Logistics, including setting up bookings for your upcoming travels and meetings.
- Stay organized by keeping up with CRM Updates & Admin Work without getting overwhelmed.
Want hands-on, high-level support? Explore the benefits of hiring an executive assistant from Wing to streamline your workday and ease decision-making fatigue.
Customer Use Case:
Admin-related tasks used to take up 10 or more hours for David, a SaaS founder. After signing up with Wing, he invested that time in raising funds and product development, which doubled his team’s productivity.
"Wing saved my week, every week. I finally feel like I’m working on my business, not drowning in it."
— David L., CEO of a Series A startup
What You Gain
- Peace of Mind
- Directing focus to High-Impact Tasks
- Overcome Decision Fatigue to preserve energy for critical decisions
- Save Time for crafting Strategy & fuelling innovation
Building a Stress-Resilient Lifestyle
As much as your stress levels depend on your work environment, your lifestyle has a role to play, too. By making changes to your way of life, you create a solid foundation for better stress management. Think about making these lasting changes.
1. Sleep Smarter
The importance of wholesome and adequate sleep is well-established by science. You need 7–9 hours of quality sleep each day to give your mind much-needed rest after a day’s hard work and help you refocus the next day.
To improve your chances of sleep, you can use blue-light filters in your room, avoid caffeine right before your sleep, and set up a wind-down routine that you consistently follow.
2. Eat to Focus
As cliché as it sounds, you are what you eat. Opt for a balanced diet that gives you your supply of essential nutrients, along with adequate hydration to achieve mental clarity. Avoid having too much sugar or overly processed food, as they can lead to energy crashes.
Eating healthy and in the right proportion not only keeps you active but also contributes to your overall well-being.
3. Move Regularly
It’s easy to underestimate what a 10-minute walk can do for you. Taking 10-minute walks cannot only soothe your mind but also increase blood flow to the brain, which can enhance your cognitive functions. It can further boost your dopamine levels, which uplift your mood and make you feel motivated.
Adding stretching exercises or a few yoga poses between Zoom meetings allows a quick refresh.
4. Set Boundaries
There are times when you feel the world crashing down on you, only because you took up more than your fair share or let others intrude on your mental peace. Only you can protect your mental space by setting clear boundaries.
One way to do that is to reserve certain times of the day as “do not disturb” times so that you can enjoy the luxury of me time. This also involves having the grit to say no to non-essential commitments that can be put off for later.
These micro-decisions can have a cumulative effect that preserves your bandwidth and helps in managing stress at work.
If you work remotely, having an organized, ergonomic space makes a huge difference in how you feel and focus. Here’s how to set up a home office for productivity and reduce daily stressors in your work environment.
Final Thoughts: Stay Calm, Stay In Control
Stress is as real as it gets, but stress management isn’t about avoiding pressure or lessening your workload. It’s more about learning to go with the flow while minimizing the unnecessary weight on your shoulders.
Implementing quick daily hacks like breathing, journaling, and breaking down tasks in terms of priority can prove beneficial. Time is money, and therefore managing your time optimally by creating time blocks and batching can keep you on track, along with making tweaks to your lifestyle.
The good news is that you don’t have to do everything yourself by tapping into the benefits of stress management and delegating to a trusted partner like Wing Assistant. We are driven to become an extension of your team to lighten your load, whether you need inbox support, someone to coordinate calendar conduct research on autopilot. Wing acts like your go-to productivity toolbox to help you stay focused on what truly matters.
Thinking about getting some help? Schedule a free consultation and explore how Wing can support your unique workflow and help you conquer your day with less stress.
Dianne has extensive experience as a Content Writer, she creates engaging content that captivates readers and ranks well online. She stays on top of industry trends to keep her work fresh and impactful. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into relatable stories. When she’s not writing, you’ll probably find her with a crochet hook in hand or working on a fun craft project. She loves bringing creativity to life, whether it’s through words or handmade creations.
