Women in Business: How are you managing your stress levels?

The challenges that women face at work are helpful in the fact they make us look for ways to recognize how to improve our life.  

Stress is on the top of many people’s list of challenges at work.  

Everyone has different levels of capacity to handle stress.  Some females’ “stress buckets”, shall we call them, can fill up faster than others.  

It is a matter of what we do next once we observe we are stressed out.  

There are various forms of exercise to relieve stress such as yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, corrective exercise, or walking — just to name a few.  

Yoga helps through breathing into poses and getting your body to release tension build-up through the poses and breath combined.  

The relaxing Shavasana at the end of a yoga session is one of the best forms of stress release to help melt your troubles away.  Yoga is known to have a long list of health benefits such as it reduces: blood pressure, hypertension, and insomnia.  

Pilates serves as a tool to align your body and focus on your moves inwardly, which helps relieve stress through changing your focus from work to self and also release the tension your body stores through movement.  

Tai Chi (my favourite!) helps you to breath from a quiet settled space as it relieves tension in your joints and helps your temperament to calm down.  

Tai Chi is generally practised outside on grass (like in a park) or sand (or on a beach), which gives you the natural, uplifting energy from the Earth. This is a powerful way to relieve stress. 

Corrective exercise is done by a CHEK (Corrective holistic exercise kinesiology) practitioner.  

They measure your posture, ask lifestyle questions, and discuss proper nutrition for your body type.  

You are given a programme based on your results containing stretches and movements to strengthen where necessary.  

If you think of your body as a wheel, there are tight spokes (tension in the body) and loose spokes (lacking stability). The goal of the CHEK practitioner is to loosen the tight spokes and tighten the loose spokes. This in turn relieves physical tension and stored stress in the body.  A CHEK practitioner also gives you tools to use breath and thought patterns to turn something negative into something positive.  

Walking is a fantastic tool to remove stress. I once read an article that claimed thirty minutes of walking a day helps contribute to reduced risk of breast cancer in women.  That’s amazing!  

Walking outside daily for thirty minutes helps with weight loss, builds your energy and clears your mind of daily stresses.  

Time

The next hurdle is time. When I hear the words “I don’t have time” from a client I know this is mostly about finding that time in your day for you and programming it in like you would any other meeting.  

‘Me’ time is an essential tool for catching yourself, focusing on yourself, and slowing down enough to help yourself sustain your daily challenges.  

‘Me’ time can be as small as five minutes or as long as one hour depending on how you programme itin to your day. I use this with clients as a tool to figure out what they really want to get out of their day verses just floating through work the whole day.  

Find a window of time and fill it with either exercise, proper breathing techniques, meditating, massage, or just healthy positive thoughts thought over and over again.  

If you are full up you feel everything that comes up as a challenge has a slightly softer edge to it.  Find what works for you and get started today!

Caroline Tee is a CHEK Practitioner, yoga certified instructor, Pilates certified instructor, and Reiki healer. She owns Horizon Health, which offers classes in corrective exercise, Pilates, Barre, and yoga. To find out more go to www.horizonhealthbermuda.com or call 293-1687.