Stress Management: A 5-Step Guide For Working Women.
Women are often give less time for stress management practices even though they are more stressed due to work and career as compared to their male counterparts.
Personal obligations, being the sole caregiver to children or elderly family members and managing household chores are mostly the main causes of stress for women.
How does stress affect you?
Other than causing day-to-day tension, stress also messes up female hormones leading to lifestyle disorders like PCOS, hypertension and thyroid.
Hormonal imbalances in women are also the leading cause of mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, infertility, and weight gain.
So, how can you manage stress?
There are some practices you can inculcate in your daily routine. It sounds cliché and it may not even show any results initially, but in the long run, this lifestyle can drastically improve health and reduce the impact of stress on the body.
Set boundaries.
Putting ourselves first is something all of us lack in. Setting boundaries is a way to respect oneself and our time. Be it relationships or work, you must safeguard your limits, so that you do not exhaust yourself from trying to do everything alone, without asking for help when you need it.
Read.
Based on a study conducted in 2009, it was found that 30 minutes of reading decreases blood pressure, heart rate and psychological distress, as effectively as yoga and humour. In addition to this, reading also has cognitive advantages that most of us are aware of. Replacing screen time before bed with reading a book significantly improves the quality of sleep thereby reducing the impact of everyday stress.
Lifestyle changes.
Sleep, diet, and exercise. We all have heard the saying, “a healthy mind lives in a healthy body”. Taking baby steps towards it, is a reasonable approach towards a better life. A light dinner, a little walk after every meal, 30 minutes of exercise each day, a few minutes of meditation, a minimum of 6 hours of sleep, and a healthy diet have a significant impact on the body’s natural stress response.
Seize the day.
Obsessing about what you could not do at work or for your family, is the stress you create for yourself. Understand that you are a human too, you also have a limited capacity to work. Practicing gratitude, enjoying your much-deserved break, and trying to live in the moment is a step towards a more stress-free life.
Learn to let go.
How much ever we try, there is always going to be something we fail in, or something which did not go our way. Learning to let go and take every failure as a lesson is a quality very less of us possess. Take conscious steps to love and care for yourself without hampering your mental health.
Stress is temporary. It is important to deal with it in such a way that it does not affect our physical or emotional wellbeing.
