How To Stay Calm In Stressful Situations

Sometimes in stressful situations your emotions can get the better of you and have an impact on your overall performance.

Stress can have a huge impact on your physical health, which includes the increased risk of heart disease, depression and obesity whilst also effecting your mental performance. The following measures are recommended to help stabilise and control the stress to ensure that if it is present, it’s not prolonged.

Avoid asking ‘what if?’

Sometimes asking yourself ‘what if’ can be a huge supplier towards stress and worry. The less time you spend thinking about potential issues that may or may not arise, the less stress will be present. You can always deal with the problems when they exist.

Stay positive

Throughout your day, try to partake or think about something positive to help motivate yourself. It doesn’t have to be anything particularly big, just anything that will help bring a positive vibe to your day.

Disconnect

Taking some time out and disconnecting yourself from the surroundings that could be causing the stress can help keep it under control. Stop making yourself available for work all hours of the day, turn off your phone/laptop even if it’s for an hour to help destress and provide that quality ‘me time’ that is needed.

Cut down on caffeine

Caffeine increases the amount of adrenaline rushing through your body, it effects your survival instinct and the ‘fight to fight’ response. The fight to fight response is your response to decision making and rational thinking; absolutely perfect if you have to run away, not so great when you have to respond to emails. By cutting down it allows for concentration levels to rise and your decision making to become more rational.

Get enough sleep

Being sleep deprived alone can cause a huge amount of stress, now add this to a day’s work and stressful projects then you have quite the concoction for your physical or mental state to decline. By having a poor night’s sleep, it reduces your attention span, self-control and memory. The perfect time that you should be trying to get each night is between seven and eight hours sleep, anything over or under this can cause problems.

Use your support network

This could be your partner, a work colleague or a friend. Sometimes talking to others about your stress can help relieve some immediately as you’re getting ‘something off your chest,’ and whoever you ask will be able to give their honest opinion on the situation as they’re not as emotionally entangled as you are.