Whether at work or at home, feeling overwhelmed by stress can have you reaching out for a prolonged break. It’s not hard to see why – a holiday can give you some time away from your stressors, placing you into a relaxing environment that can give you the reset that you feel you desperately need. Unfortunately, holidays are not always readily available, and that means that you might have to make do with shorter breaks.
This is always going to feel like a compromise – the looming return to work impossible to ignore – but shorter breaks can actually be very beneficial, provided that you give them the chance to be.
Short-Form Pastimes
If you have a half-an-hour break from work, your first instinct might be to wonder what you can do with this time. Outside of snacking or eating lunch, you might feel that all there is to do is scroll through social media before getting back to it. This might not give you the escape that you need, however, and it might be a better idea to purposefully connect with something that you find enjoyable.
Some people might want to go for a quick walk and listen to music, even if this is just around whatever local areas that they have available for this. Others might instead prefer to play some games on their phone. Modern smartphones are versatile devices, capable of blockbuster releases that you can chip away at whenever you have free time, or giving you access to some short-form games of online blackjack Australia, if that’s what you prefer.
Deploying Techniques
If you are feeling particularly overwhelmed by stress or anxiety, these shorter breaks can be ideal opportunities to resort to self-care techniques. Breathing techniques might be what you think of first here – simple ways of drawing your attention back to your breath in order to achieve mindfulness or grounding. These techniques are valuable if you often find yourself in a position where you’re feeling as though you’re panicking and suffocated by everything that you have to do. When you get home or when you get the chance, longer meditation sessions might help you to learn these techniques to the point where you can use them at a moment’s notice.
Once again, walking might be what some people prefer here, taking you both out of the environment where you’ve been stressed and also providing you with exercise that can be beneficial for your health in multiple ways.
Regular Short Breaks
If you have an element of control over the structure of your working day, consider taking very regular short breaks. Of course, you don’t want to disrupt the rhythm of your work – if you’ve got some momentum going, you don’t want to jeopardize that just for the sake of sticking to your new break quota. However, giving yourself regular intervals of rest for a few minutes at a time might prevent your workload from feeling so consistently overwhelming.
The result of these breaks could even be that you find yourself better mentally equipped to handle your workload – potentially increasing your productivity. Reworking how you work so that you’re not exhausted consistently throughout the day will be beneficial for the time that you try to spend relaxing, but if you can make the time spent working less stressful, then that might help, too. Again, though, it can be difficult to achieve this when you’re working under a very strict environment, and if that environment is starting to negatively impact your mental health, it’s always worth looking for work elsewhere for the sake of self-care.