We’re now three weeks into the new year. How is it working out for you so far? ARe your plans for the year taking shape? It’s been a slow start for me. . . We spent about 3 weeks before Christmas redecorating the kitchen, with the result that not much else got done:)

Then it was January and time to do the accounts, my least favourite activity! Having finally got all the paperwork out of the way, I’ve come down with a really bad cold, which has made me feel pretty rough for a week so far and isn’t over yet.

Still . . I have made a start on my plans for the year, with my first piece of software finished and the second in production.

But it does just show that life can be unpredictable, you have to be flexible and rest when you need to.

Dragged myself out of bed to take a friend to the cinema for his birthday on Wednesday. We watched Slumdog Millionaire – brilliant. If you are feeling low with the recession, the weather, the January blues etc, go and see it – it will cheer you up.

Lifestyle Changes

Some of your habitual behaviours and certain lifestyle choices will have an effect on your stress levels, and this in turn can have a negative effect on your ability to carry out your job, or to take the steps necessary to finding a new one. If your job is stressful and you want to leave, you’ll need to generate some positive energy by reducing stress in other areas of your life. The same applies if you are unemployed, which can be just as stressful as having a job you don’t enjoy.

Here are a few general tips:

Balance personal, work, and family needs and obligations.

Spending too much time at work, or, if you are unemployed spending all of your time looking for a job, will cause unnecessary stress and will have a detrimental effect on your efficiency.

Develop a sense of purpose in life.

Life isn’t just about work and although work may form an important part of your purpose, it’s important to look beyond your job and include spiritual and family values, as well as those related to any cause about which you have strong feelings.

Get enough sleep – your body recovers from stress and also repairs itself when you are asleep.

Eat a balanced diet

That means plenty of vegetables and fruit, less sugar and caffeine.

Exercise– make sure you take moderate exercise throughout the week.

Limit your consumption of alcohol.

Don’t smoke.

Or at least cut down.

Change Your Thinking Patterns

Everyone has had experiences where an event triggered a few negative thoughts. A good example is when someone says something to you which reminds you of a childhood event – one which caused you to feel bad, perhaps to experience a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness. The memory automatically triggers the same feelings you had years ago. These emotions will also trigger stress, in exactly the same way as a real threat, like a charging lion or, in today’s culture, a mugger. While it’s useful to be afraid of lions and muggers, because this will help you avoid them. it’s not so useful to experience fear or depression when someone says something unkind. Learning to deal effectively with your negative thoughts and feeling will really help you to reduce stress. It may take time, but if you practise telling yourself the truth, that is that you are a capable, efficient person – or whatever the opposite of the remark might be. You should also practise looking at the bigger picture. If someone says something hurtful to you, it is usually a reflection of their own unhappiness or discontent. If you can see this, it will become easier not to take other people’s comments personally.

Is stress holding you back in your career? Many people are so stressed out that they don’t have time to think about changing jobs or training for a new career.

Since stress is inevitable in life, it is important to find ways to minimize stressful incidents and decrease negative reactions to the stresses you simply can’t avoid.

Here are some of the things that can be done by just remembering, in other words, making them part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth .

Managing time

Time management skills can allow you more time with your family and friends and possibly increase your performance and productivity. This will help reduce your stress.

To improve your time management skills:

• Save time by focusing and concentrating on the task at hand. This may take practice, but the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

• Delegate wherever you can, allowing yourself to concentrate on only the
  most important tasks.
• Record how you spend your time on various tasks, and be sure to include family and leisure time. This will help you to identify time-wasting activities.
• Prioritize your time by giving each task a rating based on its importance and urgency. Use the majority of your time to those activities which have the highest score.
• Manage your commitments by not over- or under-committing.
  Don’t agree to take on projects or activities that are not important to you. In other words, learn to say no.
• Deal with procrastination by using a day planner, breaking large projects into smaller ones, and setting short-term deadlines. This will make tasks much more manageable, reducing your feelings of being overwhelmed.

Create effective coping strategies

If stress is a major issue for you, it is important that you identify your coping strategies. One way to do this is by recording each stressful event, your reaction, and how you cope, in a stress journal – which is just a fancy name for a notebook Once you become aware of your habitual patterns, you can find ways in which to change reactive behaviour which leads to even more stress.

You can also turn your stress management programme into a strategy for developing a new career, if that’s your goal. By looking at the things which cause you stress, you can choose which tasks you want to eliminate from your life ie things you don’t want in your new career and you can identify others which you enjoy, but could modify to make them less stressful.

Remember also that time management and using effective coping strategies when under pressure are very valuable transferable skills. So if you work on them now, not only will you reduce stress, you’ll also have some good examples of these skills to put in your application or discuss at your next interview.

Part 2 coming soon