Stress management: 10 tips to stress less

Do you feel stressed? Too much stress can negatively affect both life and health, so it is important to find a healthy way to cope with stress and learn to reduce stress. 

Here is our psychologists' best advice on how to reduce stress. 

What is stress?

Stress is the body's way of reacting to fear, dread, insecurity or lack of control. It is the body's defense mechanism that is basically meant to keep you safe and prepared for danger. The body tightens and the senses and instincts are sharpened. 

Stress is often due to a form of imbalance in the environment that leads to you being overwhelmed. This is a human instinct, but in modern everyday life this feeling of stress can become overwhelming and occur in situations that are not dangerous at all. Therefore, it is important to learn how to deal with and reduce stress. 

There are many factors that can lead to stress. 

Here you can take our stress test which can give an indicator of how stressed you are. 

Psychologist's advice for stress management

Below you will find 10 tips on how to reduce stress. 

Play on teams with your brain

To cope with stress, one must understand how our brain works when it comes to stress. The brain is incredibly complicated, at the same time as it operates according to simple principles. The main task of your brain is to keep you alive and safe. Therefore, your brain will prioritize keeping track of all the stupid things that have happened to you in life, to prevent it from happening again. It makes you prepared, but it does not make you happy. 

Happiness is secondary to your brain. This is why the brain will prioritize everything that makes you feel safe. So if your brain discovers that you think work is more important than rest, your brain will start thinking about work in the evening. It has been programmed to make it more important to think about work than to rest. 

To avoid and prevent stress, it is important to remember to take breaks and train yourself and your brain to know the importance of relaxing. If you do not take breaks and only focus on work, it will create a pattern in the brain that registers that you think work is more important than rest, this will thus be a priority in the brain that makes you want to think about work more often, which can lead to stress. 

Therefore, you should make sure that you take small breaks throughout the day, especially at the times when you are doing something urgent. Then your brain learns that rest is more important than work, and when the evening comes, your brain will not feel a need to think about work.

2. Give your brain breaks throughout the day

To avoid and prevent stress, it is important to remember to take breaks and train yourself and your brain to know the importance of relaxing. If you do not take breaks and only focus on work, it will create a pattern in the brain that registers that you think work is more important than rest, this will thus be a priority in the brain that makes you want to think about work more often, which can lead to stress. 

This pattern that is formed does not only apply at work, also think about how much time you spend on screen or other things that can have a negative impact on everyday life. 

Think of your brain as an engine, you do not want it to run hot all day. It must be allowed to cool down. Take short breaks throughout the day when you are not on screen or working. Have a coffee, small talk with someone, take a walk in the fresh air. Just a few minutes does wonders.

Find balance in everyday life

Probably a factor as to why they're doing so poorly. Remember that there must be balance in everyday life. Everyday life should include duty-based activities, such as work, but also pleasurable activities and rest. Each of these should take up the same amount of space in everyday life and there should be a good balance between these. If one is prioritized over the other, it often leads to stress. Which of these do not get enough time and space in your everyday life? 

Try to see your life from the outside: If you knew someone who lived your life, and you knew they were struggling with stress, what would you advise them to do? Look at your life from the outside, and look for imbalance.

4. Prepare for difficult priorities

In order for you to reduce stress, you need to make some choices. These choices will clash with the life you have lived before. You must therefore commit to this project. Stress reduction often means that we have to say no to activities we like in the first place. It is not always easy, so it is important that you remind yourself why you are doing this. 

Is it to have more time for boyfriend or kids? Is it to prevent or reduce health problems? 

These deep and important reasons you need to remind yourself when you have to say no to a workout or dinner party. 

5. Get enough sleep

Make sleep a priority and make sure you get enough sleep. 

This means not only that you set aside enough time to sleep, but that you also let your brain and body calm down before bedtime. Leave the job completely after 4 pm. Your brain spends several hours exiting work mode. 

Put away screens and other stressors before bedtime and focus on calming down to get a good night's sleep. 

6. Avoid continuous stimulation

People are often afraid to be alone with themselves, but we know this fear as boredom. As soon as we get bored, we stimulate ourselves with phone, TV, data, conversation, podcast or the like. 

Give the brain the opportunity to digest everything it has experienced throughout the day, by giving it breaks from mental activity. Go to work without listening to anything, sit a little still on the couch without doing anything. Let the brain gradually process all the impressions, so it becomes calmer and calmer in the mind. Then you will also notice that peace subsides.

7. Find a hobby

Make sure you have something that interests you, that interests you, and that is not related to duty, salary or status. It can be chess, knitting, training, being in nature, singing in a choir or something similar. There's many different hobbies you can try and find what suits you best. 

The benefit of having a hobby is that it becomes far less painful when one of the other areas of your life is not working. You have several legs to stand on, and can stand that some of the other legs fail or are not so happy. Hobbies should be exclusively positive stress, never negative stress.

8. Find meaning in everyday life outside of salary and status

Review your daily routines and ask yourself what the deeper meaning behind your daily activities is. On the way to work, you can reflect on how your work benefits others, how the salary allows you to buy skis for your children or how spending time with good colleagues feels good to you. 

Everyday motivation is often far more superficial, we make money for the sake of money, we earn status for the sake of status. Go a few notches deeper, find a deeper meaning. When everyday life is meaningful to you, it will be experienced more as positive than negative stress.

9. Consider sick leave

If no concrete action you can take is effective, you should go even further. For many, this can mean sick leave from work. 

It is no shame to be on sick leave, it is a tool society has introduced because professionals know that it is possible to be ill for both physical and mental reasons. 

Over time, stress can lead to ailments such as lack of sleep, body aches, fatigue, memory problems, restlessness and irritability. Sometimes you need sick leave to recover and reduce and prevent stress. 

10. Contact a psychologist

For many, it can be helpful to talk to a psychologist for guidance on how to cope with stress better. Psychologvirke has experienced psychologists who can help you with stress management. 

You can read more about stress management and treatment of stress by a psychologist here. 

Or book an appointment with one of our psychologists today.