[00:00:00] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna. Today I'm going to talk about the 5 ways to prevent work stress from ruining your personal life. Whether you work for somebody else or you have your own business, it can be an emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes things don't always work out like we planned. Projects take longer to complete than what we anticipated.
[00:01:00] And there's always these ups and downs on a day to day basis. But we need to make sure. That we balance our emotions, that we deal with our stress effectively so it doesn't interrupt the quality of our personal life. Because at the end of the day, As much as you love your work and your business, like I do, we still need to have a personal life because that nourishes our life, it nourishes our body. It can't be all work, we need to have a balance.
Now, occasionally in our work and in our business, we're going to have stresses, right? This is inevitable, but not all stress is bad. Stress can be good because it helps us to stretch and grow. And when you read anything from peak performers, they will often talk about how stress plus recovery equals growth, right?
So a certain amount of stress helps us to tap into our inner resources and helps us to go to the next level, right? And so when people are at this kind of high performance, the stress Seeking out stress. They're putting themselves in situations, which is more stressful because they know that they will grow exponentially. Okay, so a little bit of stress is good. Too much stress and no recovery, right?
[00:02:00] So no downtime, no headspace away from it, is going to be very draining for the body and will have the opposite effect, right? It'll really make us exhausted and burnt out.
Okay, so here are my top 5 tips to prevent Work stress from ruining your personal life number one turn off your notifications One of the things that I see when I've done corporate well being workshops Spoken to small businesses and CEOs and even in my own business this this needs or this I'm going to be talking about how you can use this feeling or this pressure to respond to notifications immediately or even after hours.
Now, that can be very disruptive if something happens within a business or a company that is, a stress or a problem that can prevent a good night time sleep and it could have it all. On your mind, even on the weekend ruining your weekend and come Monday morning, your dread going into work. So you really have to set this boundary for yourself and also set the expectation for your manager or your leader. Right?
[00:03:00] So it's really looking at Making sure all notifications are turned off and you're not looking at it at nighttime after a certain time. So say two hours before bed is your cutoff time. You're not looking at notifications and you need to have a little bit of discipline here because there's almost a little bit of like, say, what if something is wrong and if I don't respond, then I get in trouble the next day.
This is where setting the expectation is really important. So with your team, with your leader to say, look, after this time, I won't be available for notifications. You mute your notifications so you can't see them. This is really important because there's nothing worse than something popping up on your phone that encroaches on your dinner time or your evening time with your family.
Okay. And so it really does come back to setting that expectation. Personal boundary for yourself. And it goes both ways with boss and team.
One of the biggest problems I've seen with team is when I've done workplace wellbeing programs is that this is one of the biggest complaints is that they feel like the boss is texting nine o'clock at night. I feel like I need to respond to it. Okay.
[00:04:00] And that I felt was really, You know, really sucking the joy out of the job and really affecting their personal life, but they felt too afraid to put a boundary there. But so my recommendation is do it from the beginning or do it from where you are now, right? Set that expectation.
Number two, get it out of your head. The amount of times I've heard business owners and team talk about, Well, at nighttime is when I have to process everything I need to do, or I need to be thinking about all these things that are going on in my business to prevent and mitigate anything that could go wrong.
So there's a lot of stuff that they carry around in their head. There's a lot of mental load. I did a podcast on that. You should listen to it. But. The most important thing is to get it out of your head. So when you go to bed at night, you're not processing your to do list or thinking about what conversations you have to have the next day or what you need to do.
So my recommendation is at the end of the day, at the end of the workday is to write out your to do list for the next day. So that way it's not in your head. It's not being replayed over and over again, and it's not disrupting your evening or your sleep. I once had a client who felt that when she went to bed at night, it was.
[00:05:00]It's the absolute only time that she could process her work day and everything that needed to be done while she was in bed. And I suggested to her that, you know, that's a really big issue for her sleeping patterns, which she had issues with sleeping and for her to do this exercise to write everything down at the end of the day, or even before she went to bed because she felt like that space at nighttime.
There was a lot more things that popped up for her. So she wrote down everything before she went to bed. She didn't think it would make a difference. And it did. She really slept very well and very peacefully. Right? So her mind at nighttime was trying to catch up with everything. Okay. So if we can just get it out on paper, that mental to do list and everything that's kind of popping up We know that it's dealt with because it's written down.
Number three is remind yourself that you can handle whatever comes your way. You don't need to overthink it. No matter how successful someone is in business or in their, career, this is one of the common complaints that I hear is that when something pops up, some drama or some situation or some problem,
[00:06:00] they don't know how they're going to deal with it and they go into this kind of catastrophising, right? They look at the worst case scenario of what could happen and they think, I just cannot deal with that scenario. That would be the end of my business, my job, my career, whatever it is. Right. And so the most important thing that I always remind, business owners, CEOs, and team is that look at all the times you have overcome whatever problem you've faced in your business or your career, look at how many times you've been in this situation, whether a big or small that you didn't know what to do, but actually resolved in the most favorable way. Not everything is going to work out in a most favourable way. I'll be honest.
That's for everybody, right? But in those situations when things arise you will know what to do like a step by step It's not something that we can mitigate in our minds, right? Things unfold very organically We can't have a plan ahead for that, right? So it's important to remind yourself that whatever happens, you know what?
[00:07:00] I have overcome so many issues in the past I know that I have the resources, inner resources, To do it again, and again, and again. And that's what you put your trust in. If you find that the overthinking, or the overwhelm, or the anxiety still persists, then that is something that you need to address. You need to look at, is anxiety really the problem, and not the workplace and not your work.
Number four, eat to reduce your stress hormones like cortisol. So cortisol, when we have things happening in our life, cortisol spikes up and cortisol makes us feel very stressed and tense and nervous and overwhelmed and anxious, right? And when that rises, it can stay in our system for a bit of time and it can create those feelings for hours and hours or days, right?
So we want to make sure that you're eating well and eating to reduce cortisol.
[00:08:00] So this is, You know, when you're having a stressful day, things like starchy vegetables, starchy fruits like bananas and mangoes, will help to reduce cortisol levels, reduce those stress hormones, so you're not feeling so tense and so stressed, and you're able to focus and do what you need to do for the rest of the day.
of the biggest things is that when we're in this stress response, We're actually, moving out of this prefrontal cortex is part of our brain, which is rational, which is like the executive part of the brain helps us to make decisions we're in our best work when we're in the prefrontal cortex.
But when we're stressed, we move out of that place, right? And so we need to move back into it in order to do what we need to do in a day, right? And so carbohydrates like such a veg and vegetables and some whole grains will help you to move back into the prefrontal cortex. So you can be. performing at your best again.
And the other thing here is one is including healthy carbs. The other thing is to reduce or minimize or avoid completely processed carbohydrates, sugars, soft drink, cakes, biscuits, chocolates, those kinds of things are going to mess with the brain and cause you to feel more stress later on.
And number five is to have proper restorative sleep.
[00:09:00] So this means not collapsing in bed at nighttime. It should take you up to 20 minutes to fall asleep. If you fall asleep, as soon as your head hits a pillow, you're exhausted. So you really want to aim for that proper restorative sleep, getting to bed by 10 PM and having eight hours from there.
And that makes sure or ensures that you have Proper deep sleep. In deep sleep, we're producing the hormones that are healing our body, our brain is detoxifying, and the main thing is, is that our mind is processing our emotions while we're sleeping, so that when we wake up the next day, we see things differently, we can make better decisions, we feel calmer.
And we can deal with the work stress and the challenges and our schedule with a lot more ease. So we want to make sure that to get this proper restorative sleep is one, get to bed on time. So like I said, by 10 PM, getting eight hours sleep, you want to make sure you're off your devices at least an hour before bed, because the blue light is going to mess with your sleep hormones.
[00:10:00] And it means that it could take you longer to fall asleep or you're waking up in the middle of the night, but you're not getting that restorative sleep because we're not getting the melatonin production, which is Very healing for the body. If you're waking up in the morning, you have a good sleep, but you're waking up in the morning with millions of thoughts racing through your mind about work, then that's something that really needs to be addressed.
I talked about that in the previous on the mental load and the invisible load that we carry. Listen to that because that kind of thinking is going to undermine your day from the get go. So those are the five ways to prevent work stress from ruining your personal life. And as you can see, they're well within your control. Right? We don't have to change our job if we don't want to. We don't need a new boss or team member in order for us to feel less stress at work. We need to implement some of these habits and put in some of these boundaries so we create barriers so we can have a more richer personal life.
[00:11:00] I'd love you to leave me a comment below and let me know if you've had that feeling where you're taking your work home with you and that you feel like you need to offset that stress and maybe you've set up some bad habits and what are one of these habits that you can implement immediately.
