Stress Management

The paramount concept is "Do not bring the job into home” to avoid working pressure from being integrated into my privacy time and breaking the work-life balance.

How to achieve:

Adopt and commit below strategies to reduce stress and then culture a healthier lifestyle:

1. Identify the sources of stress in my life, assess how I currently cope with stress and learn healthier ways to manage stress accordingly;

2. Avoid unnecessary stress through learning how to say no, refusing to accept added responsibilities which excess my capacity;

3. Try to accept the things that I cannot change likes the things that already happened;

4. Reduce stress by nurturing myself and do something I enjoy every day, for example, listening to music;

5. Strengthen my physical health in order to be resistant to stress, for example, exercising regularly, having a healthy diet, avoiding alcohol and cigarettes, and getting enough sleep;

6. Analyze the effectiveness of these strategies by seeking feedback from my friends and family members and by performing a simple statistic as suggested by Bower & Segerstrom (2004) like measuring blood pressure and paying attention to the change.

Barriers:

1. Think repetitively jobs-related activities as habit, it could exist in my brain whenever. Unfortunately, habits can be changed, as difficult as that may seem sometimes;

2. Risk of unexpected interruption, for example, an ad-hoc assignment released from my supervisors could make me exhausted from overwork.

Reference:

Bower, J. E. & Segerstrom, S.C. 2004, Stress management, finding benefit, and immune function: positive mechanisms for intervention effects on physiology. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 56 (1): pp. 9–11