There are a host of reasons to want to cut stress out of your life. It’s unpleasant, it’s generally bad for your long-term health in a variety of ways. However, it’s also a major distraction. When you have stressful thoughts on your mind, it’s easy to lose your focus and your ability to concentrate on the task at hand. When you find that stress is clouding your mind, how do you get the clarity and focus that you need?
Here, we’re going to look at a few tips that can help you narrow your focus even when your mind is throwing all manner of distractions at you, from a visiting author.
Cutting Your Stress And Finding Your Focus
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Switch tracks
If you find that stress is getting in the way of the work that you’re trying to do at the moment, then it can help to switch yourself to a different focus. This is especially true if you’re working on a project that is frustrating in and of itself. Take the time to work on something else, such as organizing your time to make your future work easier to do. Getting out of one headspace and into another can help you stay productive so that, when you come back later to the task you were doing before, it might be a little easier to focus.
Train yourself to be more mindful
Mindfulness is a very effective strategy to help deal with stress. Mindful meditation can help you get out of your own thoughts, focusing instead on how your unconscious thought processes affect your experience throughout the day. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is a skill that you can train in, combining both aspects of yoga and meditation. It involves learning how to focus not on what’s in your head, initially, but on the experiences of individual parts of the body, such as the hand. It’s effectively a way of pivoting your thoughts away from the stress affecting them.
Keep parts of your body busy
There is something therapeutic in getting your thoughts out of your own mind; instead, redirecting your attention to a specific part of your body, which then allows you to free up other parts of your brain to focus more on the task at hand. Rubik’s cubes and stress balls are very popular for this reason. A lot of people find that tobacco for pipe is also an effective way of clearing their minds for a while. Something repetitive that engages the body physically without taking up all of your focus seems to be the key.
Get moving
The tips above can help keep parts of the body busy so that your mind can focus more on the tasks that you’re trying to complete. However, sometimes, a simple distraction doesn’t work. In that case, you might need a big distraction. Mindful movement is one means of doing this, but exercise is also greatly effective. Taking a ten to fifteen-minute exercise break can clear your mind since you won’t be thinking about much except the physical exertion. Plus, it can provide a dose of emotionally positive neurotransmitters to improve your mood for when you get back to it.
Watch that caffeine intake
There are plenty of people who don’t feel like they’re able to function in the morning without that cup of coffee. However, while they can be good for getting you mobilized at the start of the day, they are a temporary trick. In fact, if you’re already feeling stressed, they can feel therapeutic at first, but will stimulate your mind, which can up your feelings of stress. Try to drink water instead if the simple ritual of drinking something helps you therapize.
Could relaxants help?
First of all, if you have any underlying chronic health conditions or allergies, you should always contact your doctor before taking supplements of any kind. However, there is a range of supplements that people find helpful in relaxing them and creating a more peaceful work environment. Chamomile and lavender aromatherapy, as well as forms of caffeine-free tea using these herbals, are safe and natural methods that many people find effective. Hemp extract is also becoming a lot more popular. If you’re stressed, these relaxants can be just enough to calm things down, allowing you to better focus.
With the tips above, you can focus and work through your stress. However, it’s also important to take the time to take breaks, rather than just keep pushing through it. These tips work as a short-term solution for cutting your stress but you need to relieve it in the long term, too.