Stress Reducer

Stress reducer in several steps

A good stress reducer should allow a person to handle work stress, at least temporarily. There are many different stress reducer tools that you can download. For example I'm a big fan of Holothink, which is a binaural beat audio that allows a person to reduce stress in 10 minutes. I know that 10 minutes can be a lot of time for some people, but I highly recommend it (they have a free holothink stress reducer download on their site).

There are also desktop applications which can reduce stress. I'm a visual person so here is how I take virtual vacation getaways:

• Download Winamp(free)
• Tune in to Classical music station on shoutcast.com (simply search for "classical")
• Go to Google Street View
• Walk through Paris or Tokyo while listening to classical music (tip: when in street view use the "A", "S", "D", "W" keys to look around and Arrow keys for walking).

We can learn from great minds a great deal about stress management as well. For example Franklin Roosevelt used to escape to an inner fantasy in his head and relieve stress that way. Many books such as Psycho-Cybernetics base themselves on this "escape from reality theory" as well. All you need to do is close your eyes and picture something pleasent. This is extremely hard and requires a lot of practice, especially if only the negative things come to mind.

Same thing applies to work stress. The bosses and co-workers can be really hard to deal with, so to deal with the problem effectively we need to disconnect from the situation and give ourselves a breath of fresh air, then come back with renewed powers and deal with the difficult situations.

• Close your eyes
• Relax every muscle in your body
• Think of something positive that made you happy in your past or imagine something positive in the future
• If you can't think of anything make up a memory in your head and relive it
• Identify and discard negative thoughts by replacing them with the positive ones
• Take a small quick breather and exhale deeply (as if you're completely emptying your lungs)

You can also go to workrant.com and blow off some steam, but I think it's toxic to your mind in the long run (make sure your boss is not monitoring the network traffic, best if you do it from home).

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