#beblissful

Many of us can find ourselves taking our jobs home with us to our families. With a stressful job, work-life balance can feel impossible. We all want to be happy it is our nature to want to feel relaxed. Ideally, we would be able to leave work behind from the moment we walk out of the office space and be refreshed during our non-working moments. However, there are many reasons behind our feelings of stress, for example excessive workload or our own ambition to grow our career, making it difficult to leave work at work. But if we try and see the bigger picture of life and learn to stop taking the stress of our work home, simply to maintain a quality of life that is filled with positive synergy with our family, we could decrease our stress levels tremendously. Read further to understand the best ways to leave your stress behind when you are at home and increase your blissful serenity.

How We Tend To Take Work Home

Thinking About Work While Commuting:

The road home from work can be a fun ride. It’s a passage to revive yourself from any stress of the day and remove work from your mind to prepare for the serenity of home. It’s a time for you to relax, enjoy music or an audiobook. But sometimes, we replay all the things that stressed us out that day. The failed business meeting, the missed deadline or overlooked promotion. Too often such recursive stress results in a road rage or a family fight.

Consequently, these types of thoughts only increase our stress levels. The journey home can be joyous, and calm, if we only let it. Try to observe your thoughts and get out of the habit of “thinking and re-thinking”. Think about your family or the loved ones and plan a quality conversation with them when you reach home.

We Vent About Job Stress to Our Loved Ones:

Complaining about work to a loved one is a common pastime of people with stressful jobs. It feels good at the moment but may take a toll over time. While keeping feelings bottled up isn’t an optimal answer, when we spend what could be quality time with loved ones focused on all the stressors of the day, we lose even more of our day to job stress. Clearly, the less time we can spend complaining about work, the more time we’ll have to focus on things that make us happy. This week, try to notice how much time you spend complaining about work or thinking about went wrong that day to just how much time you spend re-living stressful events from work.

We Ruminate About Difficult Co-Workers:

It’s very natural to seek emotional support when dealing with difficult co-workers. However, focusing too much on the stress created by difficult co-workers and can rob us of the joy in our non-work lives. If you find yourself spending non-work hours obsessing over, replaying, or even thinking about the stress that your co-workers bring to your work life, it’s time to assess if this is the best way to spend your time and decide how to stop if you need to.

We Worry About Work Instead of Relaxing:

If you face a heavy load of stress on the job or have the kind of job that requires significant troubleshooting, it can be difficult to shut off the brainstorming part of your brain when you leave work. This is particularly true for those who work from home. If finding solutions is fun for you and it doesn’t cut into your personal life too much, it may not be a problem; it may be more of a hobby to think of new ideas for your work, especially if your work feels more like a “calling” to you, and not just a job. However, if you find yourself stressing or ruminating over problems at work, it’s best to leave that burden at work. Don’t worry, it’ll be there when you get back.

We Stress More about Stressing

If all of this is sounding a little too familiar, don’t let it stress you out. It’s fairly common to stress about work when you’re not at work, so don’t blame yourself. Focus instead on how to shrug off stress and enjoy your life when you’re not at work.

How To Leave Job Stress At Work

Tie Up Loose Ends Before You Leave:

One of the first and best ways you can leave job stress on the job is to prepare yourself before you leave. To cut down on after-hours troubleshooting, prepare a to-do list for yourself when you get back the next day. This can allow you to come in and feel focused, and it can allow you to leave and feel that things are taken care of as much as they can be until tomorrow.

If you are prone to stressing about unsolved problems when you get home, you may even take it a step further and create a list of possible solutions to any issues you think may follow you home; then you can remind yourself you’ve thought about it as much as you can, and now you need to take your mind off of things and sleep on it. Things will be clearer when you get to work again tomorrow. Knowing this can help you to leave things there.

Create a Post-Work Ritual:

Just as it helps children relax and go to sleep when they have a bedtime ritual, having a post-work ritual is a great way to help you unwind after a stressful day of work. Even better, it can be a way to create a mental habit of relaxing your mind and letting go of job stress after a long day of work.

Your routine may consist of something simple like taking a deep, cleansing breath as you walk out and intentionally reminding yourself that you have now left work both physically and mentally. One martial arts master recommends taking a deep cleansing breath, shaking out your limbs, and mentally leaving your burdens at the door. It can involve mentally going over what you’re looking forward to in the rest of your evening, or texting a loved one and refocusing your attention to your life. Experiment and see what suits you best. Whatever works for you, make it a habit and keep doing it.

Enjoy Your Commute Home:

The ride home from work can be stressful if you keep replaying the stresses of the day, or letting traffic stress upset you even more. With some planning, you can make your commute home into an experience you look forward to rather than another obstacle to overcome before you can relax. One way to maximize your commute time is to listen to audiobooks, either fiction or nonfiction in an area where you’d like to grow or that interests you.

Listening to music is also a known strategy for stress relief, and a simple one to do while sitting in an enclosed space. Mentally counting everything you have to be grateful for can not only make the time pass but can get you into a more positive frame of mind, and prime you to appreciate your loved ones more when you get home to them.

You can also keep stress buster essential oils with you and use it in your car for a quick relief with some fresh air

What to Do When You Get Home

Create a Soothing Home Environment for Yourself:

Because we spend so much of our non-work hours at home, it’s important to have a home environment that soothes your stress rather than one that leaves you feeling more stressed and tired. Because clutter has a subtle but very real effect on our stress levels, it pays to de-clutter as regularly as possible. Here are some other important strategies for creating a relaxing home environment. If your home is a haven from stress, it’s easier to let job stress melt away once you get there.

Treat Yourself:

Think about those little treats in life that put a smile on your face, and get more of them into your day. These little happiness-boosters, known as “pleasures” by psychologists, can lift your mood in a measurable way and reduce stress in the process. It can be a cup of tea, your favourite comedy, a long walk with a loved one, a soothing bath, or anything else that brings you a bit of joy. Try to mix them up so they have a bit of “newness” to them and you’ll enjoy them even more. You deserve it.

Focus on your physical as well as mental health as much as you do to your physical health. This helps you to rejuvenate your mind, body & spirit.

Cultivate Mindfulness:

Research shows that those who have a mindful perspective are more able to focus on the present moment and turn their focus away from the stress of the past or anxiety over the future. This translates into a greater ability to let job stress stay at work and enjoy the time you have each evening and weekend to simply enjoy life. Practicing mindfulness exercises can increase your ability to maintain this present moment perspective, so they are highly recommended for relieving post-job stress as well as for building resilience to stress in general.

Enlist Support:

If you need to talk about the things that stress you at work before you can let go of them, it helps to have a supportive person who will listen and help you to let go of the stress. Depending on what helps you the most, this could be someone who validates your feelings and helps you to refocus, who helps you to brainstorm and troubleshoot, or who lets you vent and turn your frustrations into laughter. It can be a friend or professional.

Enlisting support can also entail having someone to gently remind you to refocus your thoughts and energy if you start getting bogged down by stressful thoughts of work. Ultimately, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by job stress, enlisting help can mean talking to your doctor about stress or finding a good therapist who can help you to come up with coping strategies that work or a new plan.

Make Your Non-Work Time Count:

Heading towards the moment where Creation takes is honored blessing.