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Ways to Reduce Stress and Promote Mindfulness at Work

Separating your work life from your personal life is common advice, but that’s not always an easy thing to do. Whether you’re having trouble managing a mental illness, living in a stressful home environment, or struggling with too large a workload and too little time, stress can make performing your normal work duties a lot harder. As a social media specialist, I am especially aware of the need for managing stress and practicing mindfulness at work, which is why I’ve compiled a list of apps and organization tools to help.

Apps

Woman using an app on her phone. Apps are a great way to reduce stress and promote mindfulness at work.

Apple and Android both offer calming apps that provide guided meditation, breathing exercises, and ways to practice mindfulness in a matter of minutes. All of these apps are designed to adapt around your busy schedule. Here are some of my favorites:

Oak

Oak is a free app with a simple design that allows you to practice meditation and breathing in 5- to 30-minute intervals, depending on how much time you’re able to devote.

Headspace

Headspace provides a library of meditation and breathing techniques to choose from. Also, Apple Watch users are able to press a “panic” button in moments of extreme stress. Headspace offers a free trial but after that, it is either $12.99/month or $94.99/year.

Calm

Calm offers features similar to Oak and Headspace, and it was recognized as a 2017 App of the Year by Apple. Calm offers a free trial and then costs $12.99/month or $59.99/year.

If you’re unable use your phone at work, you can always Google “deep breathing GIFs.” A plethora of GIFs will come up, and then you can calm yourself by breathing in sync with their movements.

Organization Tools

A monthly calendar from October. Calendars and planners are excellent organizational tools that can help reduce stress at work through better planning.

Another way to manage stress at work is to prevent it from happening by staying organized. If you have all your due dates, current projects, and client meetings recorded in an accessible place, you can see when deadlines are approaching and decide where to focus your time and energy. Plus, writing things down helps you remember them later. Here are some suggestions for helpful tools and where to get them:

Calendars

Using monthly calendars makes it easy to track what you’ve been working on and what you have coming up each month. Thyme-is-honey.com offers free printout calendars that make planning out your month easy.

Planners

Another great organizational tool is a planner. Planners usually have monthly views and weekly views, so you can break down what’s most important for each week in more detail. TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and Target all provide cute and affordable planners to make organizing more fun.

Remember: Mental Health Is Just As Important As Physical Health

It’s important to remember you can’t produce your best work when you don’t feel like your best self. Prioritize your mental health and your work will improve.