5 Easy Ways to Reduce Stress and Anxiety

Millions of people are plagued with some sort of stress and anxiety. It hides like a monster under your bed, stealing away those precious hours of sleep that you need to function. Anxiety can also be affecting your life during the day with it wrecking confidence, causing queasiness, and having a generally negative impact on your wellbeing.  

Anxiety, in general terms, is just apprehension of things that are to come. Thinking about the future can be scary for anyone to think of, but it becomes a problem when that anxiety and stress starts to produce emotional and physical symptoms. These symptoms can be sleeping problems, irritability, fatigue, and lack of concentration and interest in your work and life.

While stress and anxiety are emotional and physical responses to dangers that aren’t always real, they can cause the development of some real problems. The best way to deal with stress is to identify what triggers these responses in you. From there, you want to adopt techniques and gather the things that will help you reduce the feeling and the symptoms that come with anxiety.

1. Proper Sleep

One of the most important methods to employ when you’re trying to reduce anxiety and stress is sleep. Proper sleep is at least eight hours of sleep a night during the majority of your week. Getting enough sleep is also tricky as insomnia can be a side effect of anxiety. To facilitate sleeping at night take steps. You can do this by trying relaxation techniques before you go to bed, shutting off electronics 20 minutes before you lay down, and ensuring you have the right bed for how you like to sleep.

Stress can cause tension in your body as well, which can result in pain in your neck and back. This pain can also make it hard for you to sleep, so you want to ensure that you have the best bed to relieve your back pain. Other types of pain can also be affecting your sleep and causing you more stress. Make sure you’re visiting your doctors and dentists to ensure that you’re in good health. Fill any cavities that can be causing you pain and talk to your doctor about other ways to improve your sleeping patterns.

2. Hygiene

Something that can help with stress management that many don’t think of is upkeeping your hygiene. Anxiety can often lead to depression, which can lead you into a downward spiral where you can’t do anything yet still feel anxious. Keeping up with simple things like hygiene can really make you feel refreshed and relaxed. Hygiene can be as simple as taking a shower, doing a facemask, brushing your hair, or anything in between. You don’t have to do anything major, but you want to make sure you have trusty, reliable tools. Shampoo and soap that have your favorite scent, your favorite corded beard trimmer, and other tools that are essential to your hygiene routine are also your weapons against the effects of anxiety. Your stress and anxiety will melt away with as you clean yourself up.

3. Cleaning

Another unexpected way to reduce anxiety is to be in a clean environment. When you’re stressed out, it can seem exhausting to clean, and you probably won’t have the energy to. However, try your best to clean the spaces you’re in most often; you’ll see your mood improve and your stress levels go down. If you’re too busy or just don’t want to clean your rooms yourself, you don’t have to worry; there are plenty of services that will clean your office or your house.

Decluttering where you live can declutter what’s going on in your mind, which can help you feel more at ease with what is going on in your life. Cleaning also gives you a little bit of exercise, which has been shown to also reduce stress and anxiety.

4. Gardening

You can turn your hobby of gardening into a way to relieve stress. A study in the Netherlands has even found that gardening is better at fighting stress than leisure activities. The participants in the study reported being in a better mood after gardening and there were lower levels of a stress hormone found in their bodies after the activity.

If your stress is stemming from always being plugged into technology, meaning you’re always on your phone and checking emails, then doing something that requires minimal attention, like gardening, can help you relax. The repetitive motions and the soothing surrounding of nature will effortlessly capture your attention. If other ways of stress relief don’t work for you, you should try gardening. To get the most out of your gardening experience read up on techniques and organic herbicide applications so that your garden will flourish.

5. Making Work Easier

A huge cause of stress for those who are business owners is actually running their business. Oftentimes, small business owners feel that every operation of their business falls on their shoulders to complete. With the right budgeting, you can afford to do so much for your company without burning yourself out. Getting an accountant or bookkeeper is the first step. From there, they can tell you who else you can hire that will take a little off your workload while ensuring you won’t break the bank. Having a website in place will also help you from worrying about the success of your business. There are useful web hosting services that can handle a lot of the work for you, so you can just sit back and relax.