How to deal with Stress 4

[l3city]

Hi fellas,
Well, it is impossible not to have stress in this bussines and almost in whatever work you have. Question for everybody,
How do you deal with stress? (i.e. project due date, conflicts, professional or personal, etc..)
Do you bike? Go to a bar? Movies? Read a book or go to the park, family? anyways, you are welcome to share your tips, opinions and experiences.
Regards

 

[ee2002]

I exercise to relieve stress. I've found that the exercise also makes you feel better all around. It improves my mood.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Professional stress ... visit Eng-Tips

Personal stress ... sit down & relax with a nice hot cuppa ... then visit Eng-Tips.

​

Helpful SW websites faq559-520​

How to find answers ... faq559-1091​

 

[KENAT]

Hot cuppa.

Never a bad idea. Coffee doesn't have the same effect.

 

[Ashereng]

We drink!!! The alternative is choking someone.
Just kidding.

A quick walk around the block (city block, with parkette and water fall) usually helps. Running is kind of hard - we don't have showers or anything like that to change afterwards.

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[ivymike]

...could always call a meeting and yell at some people.

I usually either wakeboard, eat, or drink. Sometimes all three, though rarely all at once. Come winter I'll probably have a skateboard ramp to play on. Once in a while I just go to bed as soon as I get home.

 

[KENAT]

Eat chocolate bars (not so much dealing but seemed to be what happened, Boost were my fave in such situations back in the UK)

Exercise is good, I haven't been good at it since I moved to the US but in the UK I had a little Gym set up in my garage. My punchbag was especially fun till I punched it off the wall! (Ok well technically part of the wall was still attatched)

 

[MedicineEng]

I play with my daughter. I found it quite stress relieving, up to the point that I am dead tired and she starts to cry because she wants more...

 

[kontiki99]

I exercise daily, take no more than 2 cups of coffee in a shift, meditate, dance, practice music, math problems relex me too.

 

[epoisses]

Exercise is great, but it does not address the root cause of work related stress.

Stay in charge of your work, don't let your work be in charge of you.
Manage your agenda, plan the work, work the plan.
Learn to live with the idea (and teach your boss the same thing) that you can't necessarily do all the work that people drop on your desk.
Write only a reasonable amount of "to do" items in your agenda each day. Don't carry them over to the next day all the time. If there's too much work, put priorities in order (have your boss validate that order) and start at the top without looking at the rest.
Put certain limits to your working hours and respect them.
At the end of each day, look at the few things you actually achieved and be happy with those .

 

[epoisses]

PS forgot the most important one:
for heaven's sake, become efficient!
;-)

 

[TheBlacksmith]

I try to never take anything too seriously, this annoys the crap out of other people but helps keep me sane. That does not always work so ...

Short term - walk around the building once or twice.
Regularly - exercise followed by sauna.
Extreme cases - go to the range and shoot 75 to 150 clays.

 

[wes616]

I find that I get a lot less stressed at work on days where I run before work, than days where I run after. Maybe it is preemptive stress relief (however its hard to get up at a quarter to 5 in the morning).

On an incredibly painfully stressed day at work, when I hit the gym, I usually don't have my head in the game enough to get a really good workout. I've learned to take it easy on those days.

Wes C.
------------------------------
Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

 

[Comcokid]

As epoisses indirectly indicates, one place stress comes from is a lack of control of your work environment. This can be created by unanticipated project problems, or by the company environment and management at the company.

Frankly, what I do is surf Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com to reassure myself that I do have career value and marketable skills - and options to find a better workplace.

 

[epoisses]

However, Comcokid, there is no stress-free workplace because stress is in your head... or it isn't. Nobody else is to blame for your stress (your headaches, your eventual heart attack...) except yourself. This sounds very cruel, but as soon as you realise that you either create your own stress or not, this very fact actually relieves some of the stress and you can start to step-by-step manage your work.

BTW as you can see I have had a stress management training because I wouldn't be able to invent all this myself but I deeply believe in it. The trainer even related stress with cancer ("your cancer is your own fault") - I wouldn't go as far as that, I wouldn't even claim that we know exactly what causes cancer in the first place, but anyway.
According to the training, stress in general follows from the discrepancy between experiencing a mental + physical reaction due to a threatening phenomenon (say an amount of work that you can't finish with all kinds of consequences for your performance evaluation and the rest of your career) and not being able... I mean the FEELING of not being able to do anything about it. And that's why starting to do something about it is the key to getting rid of stress.

 

[kontiki99]

Get enough rest too.

When I don't, I find I tend to drink too much coffee and and eat toxic substances from the snack machine to stay awake.

The caffeine sugar combination really lowers my performance and ability to triage without getting involved.

We are all just brokering finite resources.

 

[MadMango]

I just recognize that there are factors that are outside of my control. Why stress over things that I cannot possibly influence?

Deep breathing and walk through the shop helps too.

[green]"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."[/green]
Steven K. Roberts, Technomad
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[kchayfie]

Developing teflon shoulders helps as well. When I have loads of people trying to dump massive amounts of work on me, instead of getting stressed, I make them fight it out between themselves: "he says his calculation needs to be finished by yesterday as well. why don't the two of you figure out which is more urgent and get back to me. otherwise i'll get to it in the order it appeared on my to do list"...

Makes it much easier to ignore pushy colleagues who think everything they do is the most important thing in the company and that you deserve to be as stressed as they choose to be.

 

[ewh]

I pretty much follow epoisses' recomendations, and always try to remember that work is not my entire life, but only a means to an end.

 

[MikeHalloran]

I tried meditation after lunch for a while. Feet up, eyes closed, quiet. It works, but too many people, including especially bosses, confuse it with sleeping.

Now I just get up and take a walk through the shop, which has several virtues:
- It establishes and maintains a relationship with the people who actually do the work that I plan.
- It helps me keep track of what is happening, and of what is not happening.
- It makes the office's erratic air conditioning seem not so bad after all.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA