desk stretches and run through the routine at least a few times a day.

Take a walk: Those durned hippies were right. Multiple studies show that being outdoors (or even just looking at pictures of natural landscapes) reduces stress and causes heart rates to decrease. If your office is in an urban area, try to find some local parks. Besides the physiological benefits of exercise and vitamin D, being around trees or absorbing natural daylight will have an uplifting effect on your mood. If your building happens to be located in a park-free zone, try opening the windows or putting a few houseplants on your desk.

Block out the chatter

With e-mail, IM and two different phone lines pinging you all day, it's no wonder if you end up a bit frazzled. By eliminating pesky distractions, you can maintain a sense of calm at your desk.

Log out of chat for an hour or two each morning to help you focus.

Tweak your e-mail settings. Build filters for personal e-mail, so it gets dumped into a separate folder. By keeping your inbox all business, you'll have fewer distractions. Turn off new mail notifications, they interrupt your flow. Also, set up your e-mail client to grab new messages once or twice daily, instead of constantly checking your inbox. If you use Gmail or Yahoo mail, minimize the browser tab or close it entirely.

If you have the kind of job that requires you to be instantly available, there are other tricks you can do to maintain a sense of calm at your desk.

Go invisible on IM. You can stay logged in and you can still initiate chats, but you won't get roped into any unexpected fire drills. Google Chat and a few other popular clients have an invisible status choice.

Get headphones. Wear a pair of noise-canceling headphones to drown out office chatter. And play some Mozart.

Breathe

Stress and anxiety are common causes of hyperventilation, which increases the amount of oxygen in your blood but can also have the unfortunate side effect of causing you to pass out. Since fainting is not a very productive way of easing out of your latest assignment, practicing meditation and yogic breathing techniques can keep your mind, hands and heartbeat steady.

Even the most staunchly non-Buddhist can get a leg up with the help of apps like Be Happy Now, which includes a helpful "bonus" meditation called "Doing the Work."

If you don't have twenty minutes to set aside, simply taking a few deep breaths while counting backwards from ten can work wonders.

Take a nap

Despite the proven benefits of a mid-afternoon nap, most corporate offices don't keep cots in the lobby or give you a long enough lunch hour to sneak home and snooze for a bit. Don't be embarrassed; while the siesta has been a time-honored tradition in Spain, their British neighbors have been catching on with National Nap at Work Week, which is a little more generous than our own American National Napping Day.

Miss Cellania at Mental Floss offers many tips to help you doze off unobtrusively, some (propping your head) more helpful than others (eyelid tape).

Quit

Even in an economic downtown, the pros and cons of a job that gives you unmanageable amounts of stress have to be weighed. Finding a new job will be difficult, but is the prolonged anxiety of paying the rent any worse than dreading coming into work? Only you will know for sure.

This page was last modified 17:37, 20 September 2010 by snackfight. Based on work by pstatz and howto_admin.

Authors: Michael Calore

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