How to reduce stress and improve focus?

Are you aware that being stressed reduces our ability to focus?

In 2021, 71% of employees found it difficult to concentrate at work, compared to 65% (6% increase) in 2020 and 45% (25% increase) in 2018. Several factors could contribute to this increase, but we can't ignore the importance of the growing stress.

The results above originate from the Mind The Workplace: Employer Responsibility to Employee Mental Health by MHA which included a survey that measured the perceptions of over 11,301 employees across 17 industries in the United States.

The survey pointed out that stress influences our life (click to enlarge the image on the right). 80% of the employees felt that stress influenced their relations with their family and colleagues.

The report also pointed out that in September 2021, 4.4 million people resigned from their positions due to inflexibility, burnout or re-evaluation of life priorities. And the stress levels are high as the 2021 survey findings showed that 78% of employees agreed that their workplace stress affects their mental health.

HOW TO REDUCE BURNOUT?

In the previous, Work Health Survey employees clearly stated that they are experiencing the early signs of burnout as 83% of respondents felt emotionally drained from their work.

How is your situation?

Are you aware that employee burnout is fully preventable?

For this, you genuinely need to implement an early proactive mental wellness approach that is workplace-wide and focuses on stress reduction by learning practical intrapersonal skills.
 

WHAT IS STRESS?

Stress is the adverse inner reactivity that a person experiences when coming in contact with excessive external pressures. Stress is experienced within the mind of the person who fails to handle such external pressure.

Successful stress reduction needs to start from within your own mind. Only when you learn how to reduce your inner reactivity can you learn to handle external stressors successfully.

What happens around us, is always beyond our control. Yes, you can influence some of the processes to some extent, but not most of the processes. Let's take falling markets, there you can sell or keep your shares, but it is beyond your ability to influence the overall mindset. When most people have a negative outlook on markets, markets fall at least until the currently dominating mindset shifts.

Your ability to respond by using your awareness allows you to notice external stressors, remain innerly calm and collect data until you can decide what to do. Keeping a calm mind and making informed and an aware decision is what always matters.

When our mind is calm, we aren't afraid to make decisions, fail or try again.

A calm mind doesn't procrastinate but dares to take into account the risks and acts despite them. In fact, a falling market can be good as you can spot investment opportunities, come up with new services or goods and solve the problems that people face. It is the question of your mindset, that matters here.

People experience external stressors differently. A problem for one person can represent an opportunity of a lifetime for the other. It comes down to an elementary question: Is your mind/brain prepared to act efficiently, especially when facing external pressure?

The removal of external stressors has inevitably been a mission impossible.

Coming in contact with external pressure has never presented your true problem. The actual problem here is removing your own inadequate inner reactions that lead to emotional and mental overload. Failure to deal with your inner reactions constitutes a source of your stress.
 

HOW TO SHIFT MY MINDSET?

Instead of seeing a problematic situation as a problem, you can look at it as a challenge. Only by asking what can I do, can you move closer to a solution.

When you know how to define the path to a solution, it is great, when you don't you look at the first step you can do. It can be as simple as collecting data and analyzing it or defining a vision for a solution and then taking the first step towards making that vision real.

WHAT IS 100% UNDER YOUR CONTROL?

Only you can control what is going on within your mind. When you stop reacting to everything you see and hear, you have time to observe and choose how to respond to what truly matters.

Often most of the news and situations around us aren't that relevant to our situation. For example, there is a cruel war in Ukraine, but if you live in the U.S. or the UK, it doesn't influence you that much. You need to keep doing what matters in your unique situation.

One of the most important aspects that will allow you to focus and get things done is knowing how to keep a calm mind. A calm mind is never reactive, it observes situations in peace and acts according to the opportunities you notice.

Having a calm mind allows also you to replace your own inner automatic reactions with an adequate response. Your mind is no longer highjacked by the monkey mind and thus it has the freedom to focus.

We all can learn how to keep our focus, however, as the 2022 MHA study pointed out, most of us have failed here big time as 71% of employees found it difficult to concentrate at work. How good is your ability to hold focus?

THE ABILITY TO FOCUS IS AN ESSENTIAL INTRAPERSONAL SKILL

Freedom to focus has its origin in awareness-based intrapersonal skills. Such skills are learnable and practical.

You can apply intrapersonal skills in all work and life situations. As a result, you can do much more than just focus, you can also take initiative, access insights and creativity and as a result, enjoy a healthy life.

Most of us today lack such practical and applicable intrapersonal skills. Thus, our reality is the outer stressors influence us. As intrapersonal skills are personal you either have them or don't. That is why everyone needs to invest their time and effort to learn them!

Until you lack intrapersonal skills, the stressors around you will most likely create overwhelming situations for your mind. Constantly reacting in such situations removes your ability to focus on your work tasks or even relax efficiently.

The monkey mind sooner or later leaves you overwhelmed and stressed, thus leading to different physical and mental health issues that lower your life quality and ability to get things done.

The problem with the stress and burnout process is that it develops extremely slowly. Employee or leader burnout never happens overnight.

First, your episodes of inner reactivity need to turn into stress. Second, your stress episodes need to turn into chronic stress. Third, those chronic stress episodes start to influence your lifestyle and choices in the way that you start passing slowly through several phases of burnout.

How far have you come? What is your stress situation?
 

What happens slowly in your mind is difficult to detect until you understand your inner domain and have good intrapersonal skills to track your mental and emotional processes.

The problem here is that most of us don't know our natural calm inner state. You are probably so used to the inner noise that you easily accept excess levels of stress. 

When our mind is busy and processes everything all the time, dark inner feelings and adrenaline-burning activities become unnoticed in time. So, the burden of burnout can slowly pave its path until one day you may be too depleted to get up and move on. And by then it is too late for you. Now you are actually burned out and your physical body and mind both suffer.

Do you really need that personal experience?

HOW DO I NIP STRESS AND BURNOUT IN THE BUD?

The short answer is, by learning intrapersonal skills and then using those skills to lead your inner domain. It sounds straightforward, provided that you first take time to adequately understand your own mind.

The early proactive approach here represents the most effective path. A direct path that is suitable to any person, regardless of their age, chosen profession or life experience.

Intrapersonal skills allow you to detect your own habitual inner patterns and make healthy choices to correct them before stress turns into burnout or anxiousness into anxiety.

The effort to alter your harmful habits is always an effort. However, this effort is now, while you are still relatively well, considerably easier to take than later on when you are burning out or already mentally or physically ill.

Please recall a situation when you felt unwell. Was it then more difficult for you to focus and work then than it is while you are well?

Only when you learn intrapersonal skills while you are well, your effort to set up inner success patterns is easy. When you aren't any longer mentally and physically fit, your effort to make any change becomes harder. But let us remind you that when you feel ill, it takes enormous effort to get well again.

So, learning intrapersonal skills is the easy path! Of course, provided that you invest your time and effort wisely RIGHT NOW!

Stress and burnout, in the final analysis, represent the outcomes of unhealthy lifestyle choices. Our positive-stress-based and short-lived success is here the driver that steers us to the wrong path of depleting ourselves. It is like using a credit card to feel good at a party where you buy drinks for everyone in the bar and get drunk. By all means, you can have a blast, but the bill, later on, keeps haunting you until you pay it.

HOW TO REDUCE YOUR STRESS TO A HEALTHY LEVEL?

When you take the time and effort to learn intrapersonal skills you can discover how to handle your inner reactivity. Becoming more aware of your awareness and inner processes allows you to improve your self-leadership and inner calmness.

When you know your inner domain, you discover that stress is no longer a mystery, but something you can master and reduce at will. We offer the online training 'Performing Under Pressure' which permits you to learn how to reduce stress and prevent burnout.

CONCLUSION – START WITH STRESS REDUCTION NOW!

Practical intrapersonal skills that enable you to reduce stress allow you to prevent burnout and work-related mental health problems long before those turn problematic.

Only a systematic intrapersonal education, that is suitable and applicable to work situations, allows you to make sure you can stay well amid the very difficult autumn/winter period that we face this year

While the inflation and different pressures around us keep building, we still need to get things done and live healthy lives.

When your conscious mind is well, you can contribute meaningful work for the service of others. And when your work is meaningful, you can turn the world that we all share into a better place.

All profound change takes place one person and one step at a time. Be an intelligent person who makes that beneficial impact! Be a person with a fit mind and pave a path to success for you, your family and your business.
 

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This blog post is by Kaur Lass