If You're Under Stress,
Changing This One Habit Can Make a World of Difference
By reducing how much pressure you put on
yourself, you open the door to some relief.
Stress, even when not a killer (and it can be), can leave you
tired, in pain, and less able to deal with life and work. You could listen to
a song that reduces anxiety, but welcoming an earworm can become its own problem.
Instead, try focusing some energy on getting
control over one habit you probably have in this modern world: cell-phone
addiction. OK, so you're not an addict? Then lock the phone up for a week--even
a day--and notice the results. If even the thought leaves you queasy and wondering
how you will manage, then you have an unhealthy relationship with it.
Phones are supposed to be tools that serve you. The problem is
that they become task masters. Whether you're looking for emails from work
colleagues or checking the latest social network post, the phone is driving
what you have to do rather than enabling your schedule and needs.
The effect is like having a landline phone ring constantly at
your desk. People constantly want something that will interrupt what you do.
You try to accommodate, constantly juggling your schedule and deadlines, and
then feel the stress of being out of control. Except, in this case, it's not
just phone calls. Email, texts, IMs, and social media all bear down, clamoring
for your attention and usually setting off notifications.
It's fine to say cut back on use, but how do you do that? The
first thing is to know that you needn't toss your phone or lock it in a safe
whose combination you don't know. You reduce stress by reducing its instances.
Even cutting back on part of it, and part of your phone use, is a start. Here
are some suggestions.
Open your day without the phone
Some of the common advice you hear when looking into cutting
back on phone use is to avoid immediately jumping in. You really don't need to
see the emails, social media posts, and texts right away. Instead, try starting
with the great time management tip of planning your day. (Reading and
responding to messages will become one of your tasks.) Continue with breakfast,
coffee, meditation, exercise, or anything else you would like to do. This way
you gain control over your day.
Consider how urgent something really is
Much of our response to urgent
requests is perceived. We have to answer the message, start the task, check the
social posts now. But we're generally the ones who assume the
urgency. Sometimes we're right. Often we're wrong. Realize that if something is
truly urgent and needs to be dealt with in the next hour or two, an email
probably isn't someone's first choice to reach you. A text might be. Set aside
several times during the day in which you'll open your phone and check on
things.
This step may take some
negotiation. Talk to superiors, people who report to you, family members, and
close friends. Set up a way for them to reach you promptly when necessary,
explaining that you're trying to bring your communications under control. Most
people will understand. If you're working in a team situation, things can get more complicated. In that case, look at the book Sleeping
With Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and
Change the Way You Work by Harvard Business School
professor Leslie Perlow. Despite the title, it's about the bigger effort to put
work under control. If people at the Boston Consulting Group can manage to get
their phone habits under control, gain more personal time, reduce travel, and
work shorter weeks, you can as well.
Turn off most notifications
You can adjust push notices, alerts, and all the other beeps,
blurps, and buzzes that come from your phone. Some of this may need to happen
on a per-app basis. Some can be handled globally through the phone's overall
settings. The less the phone calls to you, the less demanding it becomes. You
can more easily put the device in a pocket and leave it there, because it
doesn't remind you of its presence as much. At the same time, you can probably
set up special ringtones for people whose calls you need to take right away.
Let the phone serve your needs.
Forget multitasking
Multitasking doesn't really work. People don't effectively do
multiple things at the same time, even if they think they do. Every new task
pulls away from the others. Even computers don't multitask the way people
assume they do. Everything gets a little slice of time, being swapped in and
out at a ridiculously fast rate. People don't work that way, so don't try it.
When you're driving, just drive (unless you use the phone to listen to music or
an audio book). When having a meal with someone, don't take the phone out. Let
yourself enjoy the actual process of your life.
End your day without the phone
You'll see it soon enough in the morning. Cultivate the habit of
shutting off the phone--and tablet and computer--at a certain point and give
yourself time to decompress. Maybe you'll listen to music, read, watch
television, draw, study a new subject, talk with your significant other, or a
mix of all of the above. Once it's off, don't turn it back on again that night.
Over time, you'll adjust to the new way of working. Stress will
have shrunk a perceptible amount, because you're not constantly using the phone
as a method of self-agitation. You'll get more done and be happier about it
all.
By Erik Sherman
http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/if-youre-under-stress-changing-this-one-habit-can-make-a-world-of-difference.html
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