Stress basics (8)
- Stress assessment
- Stress symptoms: Effects on your body, feelings and behavior
- Stress: Win control over the stress in your life
- see all in Stress basics
Stress relief (19)
- Social support: Tap this tool to reduce stress
- Stress relief from laughter? Yes, no joke
- Spirituality and stress relief: Make the connection
- see all in Stress relief
Relaxation techniques (7)
- Relaxation techniques: Learn ways to reduce your stress
- Meditation: Take a stress-reduction break wherever you are
- Tai chi: Discover the many possible health benefits
- see all in Relaxation techniques
Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
continued:
Tips for coping with stress
Improve your time management skills
Effective time management skills can help you identify goals, set priorities and minimize stress in your life. Use these tips to improve your time management skills and lower your stress level.
- Create realistic expectations and deadlines for yourself, and set regular progress reviews.
- Throw away unimportant papers on your desk.
- Prepare a master list of tasks. Throughout the day, scan your master list and work on tasks in priority order.
- Use a planner. Store addresses and telephone numbers there. Copy tasks from your master list onto the page for the day on which you expect to do them. Evaluate and prioritize daily.
- For especially important or difficult projects, reserve an interruption-free block of time behind closed doors.
Extinguish job burnout
Nowhere is stress more likely than in the workplace. Twenty-five percent of people say that their job is the primary stressor in their lives. And the vast majority of workers believe that on-the-job stress is worse today than it was just 10 years ago.
Job stress can affect your professional and personal relationships, your livelihood, and your health.
Here are strategies you can use:
- Identify the source of the problem. Whether it's an unrealistic workload, job insecurity, inadequate compensation, office politics or a hostile work environment, you need to figure out what's making you miserable at work and then take steps to deal with it.
- Develop friendships at work and outside the office. Sharing unsettling feelings with people you trust is the first step toward resolving them. Minimize activities with "negative" people who only reinforce bad feelings.
- Take time off. Take a vacation or a long weekend. During the workday, take short breaks.
- Set limits. When necessary, learn to say no in a friendly but firm manner.
- Choose battles wisely. Don't rush to argue every time someone disagrees with you. Keep a cool head, and save your argument for things that really matter.
- Have an outlet. Read, enjoy a hobby, exercise or get involved in some other activity that is relaxing and gets your mind off work.
- Seek help. If none of these things relieves your feelings of stress or burnout, ask a health care professional for advice.
(2 of 2)
