A Columbia University Professor tells How Successful People are Defeating Stress

Everyone who has ever held a job has, at some point, felt the pressure of work-related stress. Any job can have stressful elements, even if you love what you do. This is life in the modern workplace. It is more or less impossible to be any kind of professional these days and not experience frequent bouts of intense stress.

In the short-term, you may experience pressure to meet a deadline or to fulfill a challenging obligation. But when work stress becomes chronic, it can be overwhelming — and harmful to both physical and emotional health. However, if handled properly, one can sail through problems without being too hard on themselves, and what could be better than trying a few tried and tested methods to deal with stress.

Here’s Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, giving out some life saving advice. She says - the difference between those who are successful and those who aren’t is not whether or not you suffer from stress, but how you deal with it when you do.

So, here are scientifically-proven strategies for defeating stress whenever it strikes.

1. Have self-compassion
Self-compassion is, in essence, cutting yourself some slack. It’s being willing to look at your mistakes or failures with kindness and understanding — without harsh criticism or defensiveness. Studies show that people who are self-compassionate are happier, more optimistic, and less anxious and depressed. That’s probably not surprising. But here’s the kicker: they are more successful, too. Most of us believe that we need to be hard on ourselves to perform at our best, but it turns out that’s 100 percent wrong. A dose of self-compassion when things are at their most difficult can reduce your stress and improve your performance, by making it easier to learn from your mistakes. So remember that to err is human, and give yourself a break.

2. Remember the “Big Picture.”
Anything you need or want to do can be thought of in more than one way. For instance, “exercising” can be described in Big Picture terms, like “getting healthier” — the why of exercising — or it can be described in more concrete terms, like “running two miles” — the how of exercising. Thinking Big Picture about the work you do can be very energizing in the face of stress and challenge, because you are linking one particular, often small action to a greater meaning or purpose. Something that may not seem important or valuable on its own gets cast in a whole new light. So when staying that extra hour at work at the end of an exhausting day is thought of as “helping my career” rather than “answering emails for 60 more minutes,” you’ll be much more likely to want to stay put and work hard.

3. Rely on routines.
The major causes of stress in your work life would probably be things like deadlines, a heavy workload, bureaucracy, or your terrible boss. You probably wouldn’t say “having to make so many decisions,” because most people aren’t aware that this is a powerful and pervasive cause of stress in their lives. Every time you make a decision — whether it’s about hiring a new employee, about when to schedule a meeting with your supervisor, or hunting a dress while shopping— you create a state of mental tension that is, in fact, stressful. The solution is to reduce the number of decisions you need to make by using routines. If there’s something you need to do every day, do it at the same time every day.

“You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day… You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia,” said President Obama during one of hisinterviews.

4. Take five (or ten) minutes to do something you find interesting.
If there were something you could add to your car’s engine, so that after driving it a hundred miles, you’d end up with more gas in the tank than you started with, wouldn’t you use it? Even if nothing like that exists for your car just yet, there is something you can do for yourself that will have the same effect… doing something interesting. It doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it interests you. Recent research shows that interest doesn’t just keep you going despite fatigue, it actually replenishes your energy. And then that replenished energy flows into whatever you do next.FYI: Interesting does not have to mean effortless. The same studies that showed that interest replenished energy showed that it did so even when the interesting task was difficult and required effort.

5. Add where and when to your to-do list.
Do you have a to-do list? And do you find that a day or a week (or sometimes longer) will frequently pass by without a single item getting checked off? Stressful, isn’t it? What you need is a way to get the things done that you set out to do in a timely manner. What you need is if-then planning (or what psychologists call “implementation intentions”). Nearly 200 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will complete a task (e.g., “If it is 4pm, then I will return any phone calls I should return today”) can double or triple your chances of actually doing it.

So take the tasks on your to-do list, and add a specific when and where to each. Now that you’ve created an if-then plan, your unconscious brain will start scanning the environment, searching for the situation in the “if” part of your plan. This enables you to seize the critical moment and make the call, even when you are busy doing other things. And what better way is there to cut down on your stress than crossing things off your to-do list?

6. Use if-thens for positive self-talk.
Another way to combat stress using if-then plans is to direct them at the experience of stress itself, rather than at its causes. Recent studies show that if-then plans can help us to control our emotional responses to situations in which we feel fear, sadness, fatigue, self-doubt, or even disgust. Simply decide what kind of response you would like to have instead of feeling stress, and make a plan that links your desired response to the situations that tend to raise your blood pressure. For instance, “If I see lots of emails in my Inbox, then I will stay calm and relaxed,” or, “If a deadline is approaching, then I will keep a cool head.”

7. See your work in terms of progress, not perfection
You can think of it as the difference between wanting to show that you are smart versus wanting to get smarter.

When you have a Be-Good mindset, you expect to be able to do everything perfectly right out of the gate, and you constantly (often unconsciously) compare yourself to other people, to see how you “size up.” You quickly start to doubt your ability when things don’t go smoothly, and this creates a lot of stress and anxiety. Ironically, worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail. A Get-Better mindset, on the other hand, leads instead to self-comparison and a concern with making progress — how well are you doing today, compared with how you did yesterday, last month, or last year? When you think about what you are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that you may make some mistakes along the way, you experience far less stress, and you stay motivated despite the setbacks that might occur.

Put some or all of these strategies for fighting stress, and you will see real changes not only in the workplace, but in every area of your life.

(Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of the bestselling Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. Her latest book is No One Understands You and What to Do About It, which has been featured in national and international media.)