Tips & Quips—TIP: Easy Access for Stress Management
This is one of my favorite tips that I had forgotten about but started using again myself a few months ago. Ready?
Make it easy to engage in the things that reduce your stress.
Firstly, you have to know what reduces your stress. Now, I’m not talking about massages, naps, exercise, or any other endeavor that a) involves another person, b) requires a change of clothes (or no clothes), or c) takes more than 5-10 minutes. For this tip, these are activities that you can do in only 5 minutes (10, at most) to help you reduce your stress throughout the day. Here are a few of mine:
Coloring
Petting my dog and having a little nose-to-nose visit
Word games on my phone (I currently love the NYT’s Strands)
Music playlist or specific songs
“Folders” on Instagram with funny or inspirational reels
Walking around my office (literally, in circles)
Organizing something small (like new mail)
It’s a varied list, I know. The item that I have revisited in recent months is the first one: coloring. Years ago, I wrote a few articles on how coloring was meditative for me. It still is. However, in the past, I’d sit down and color for hours. It was highly therapeutic, so I started to believe I would only get a benefit if I had hours to devote to it. Wrong. It’s equally as therapeutic to spend 5-10 minutes coloring randomly throughout my day.
Back in April, I decided to keep a coloring page out on my desk alongside a set of markers. This allowed me to take five minutes at various points during the day to pause, reset, and de-stress. It has been incredibly helpful—more than I thought it would be, actually.
The key is making sure these things are readily available and easy to access. Plus, when you have a wide variety of things to choose from, you can reset multiple times throughout your day with ease. Try it! I think you’ll find it helps.