Manage freelance stress

1. Move your body

Your stress response changes the chemicals in your body and prepares you to fight or run. This response can be very effective at keeping you out of harm’s way during short, sharp bursts, but it’s often less helpful to you when you’re feeling continually stressed.

Moving your body can be a great way to harness the stress response, change the chemicals in your body, and ultimately help you feel happier and calmer.

Exercise doesn’t have to mean long runs or high-intensity workouts. Cleaning the house, going up and down the stairs or dancing in the kitchen are all exercises.

Find an exercise you like and try it.

2. Understand it and learn from it

Stress makes us want to avoid situations and force ourselves not to think about them. But sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is acknowledge that you’re feeling stressed and try to figure out what might be causing it.

It can be helpful to talk it over with someone you trust or write about your thoughts and feelings. It can also help you learn more about how you feel under stress and what the triggers are. It could help you overcome stressful challenges in new ways.

3. Know what you can control

You may feel like everything is out of your control right now, and it can be a scary experience. But you still have some control.

You may find it helpful to make a list of what you can control and what you cannot. Sometimes you may notice that you’re wasting your precious energy on things you can’t do anything about, rather than focusing on areas you can influence.

Knowing what you can control will help you know where to focus your energy and give you a sense of control.

Remember, we are all different

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solutions for dealing with stress. Be curious, try a few different ideas and see what works for you.

You might like to visit mental health at work for more ideas on how to manage and reduce stress.

• Kim, JJ and DM Diamond. “The Stressed Hippocampus, Synaptic Plasticity, and Lost Memories.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, No. 6 (2002): 452–462

Pressure versus stress