Posts in "Stress"

5 steps to a balanced life

“Life at any time can become difficult: life at any time can become easy. It all depends upon how one adjusts oneself to life.” Anonymous

During this series, several factors were discussed which are often taken for granted in the course of our chaotic lives today. A lot of the time we forget the simple things which, not only help us to get from one day to the next  but which keep us anchored, healthy and motivated to continue doing what we do. I hope some of the things discussed this week will help you enjoy a more balanced and healthy life;

1. Diets: Diets tend to be one of the first things which go out of whack when we enter very ‘busy’ periods in our life. The effect of this however is felt on all aspects of our life. It is unhealthy, productivity goes down and we just don’t feel that great about ourselves. We have to do all we can to keep this aspect in check at all times for a more balanced life. To read more tips and suggestions on keeping a balanced diet please click here.

2. Sleep: A lack of rest can impact severely on the quality of life. When you are working on complex deals which are extremely draining, having a set routine for sleep can dramatically increase your productivity, motivation and overall drive. To read more tips and suggestions on developing a balanced sleeping routine please click here.

3. Exercise Routine: Lethargy and restlessness can result from being pent up in an office all day long. The body needs a release outlet to get some fresh air into the system. Developing and sticking to an exercise routine can be a challenge, however, if you do set one for yourself you will be pleasantly surprised with the outcome. To read more tips and suggestions on sticking to your exercise routine please click here.

4. Family and Friends: In life we need anchors to keep us rooted and prevent us from drifting too far off course. Family and friends are one of these anchors and help us do just that. Sometimes when we are caught up in our busy lives we forget how important they are to us. In order to have a balanced lifestyle we need to focus on stuff other than, bottom line results and material acquisitions, we need to focus on the things which really matter. To read more about keeping in touch please click here.

5. Inspirational Story: A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was….To read the entire story please click here.

In life , we are all intent on reaching our goals and acheiving our dreams. Along this journey, life…happens, and we tend to get busy with the details and the little things. Soon, if we haven’t paid too much attention to the bigger picture we may find ourselves in a place we do not want to be. Don’t let that happen. From time to time come up for air and see if you are moving in the right direction before it is too late to turn around. 

p.s stop along the way, periodically, to smell the roses and actually enjoy the ride . 

 

Friends and Family

“There are the families that we are born into, and there are the families that we choose; our circle of friends. While their faces may change over the course of our lives, the joy they bring us remains constant.” Anonymous

Anchors are used to stabilize ships during choppy times, control speed and even provide directional control. When a ship loses its anchor, it tends to drift into unchartered territories without being aware of the direction the ship is taking. If the anchor is not restored, you may move so much off track that finding your way back sometimes take a lifetime. 

In life, family and friends provide your ship with a similar kind of anchor. They help keep you grounded, provide support and allow you to remember where you come from and the value system you represent. This is a critical aspect of our identity, I am however often surprised how life has this uncanny ability to make us forget our true anchors and drift unknowingly wherever the wind takes us. We get so busy and caught up in our lives, we forget to pay attention to the little things in life that matter and find ourselves having lost our way to what really matters the most . 

During periods where we are working 16-18 hour a day for extended periods of time this bond between family and friends gets strained. What I have come to realize is that we do not need to do much to keep this relationship alive. A phone call or an email goes a long way in just letting the people you care about know that you are well and thinking of them . Facebook now allows us to stay in touch and has made it very easy to do so. With all these convenience which are only a click away we still make excuses and do not make that phone call or send that email or even leave a message. I know I have been guilty of this in the past and looking back, I don’t know why it was so hard.

We all work really hard at achieving the goals we set out for ourselves. What I am learning is, that along the way we have to pay much closer attention to the world around us today. There will be very little satisfaction in getting everything you want if you then find that when you get there, no one is around to celebrate your success with. 

 

Exercise Routines

“Exercise is the chief source of improvement in our faculties.” Hugh Blair

Its been a really long week, you are sitting at your workstation with a ton of work, but you just cannot get started. The words to describe this, more often than not, is “Lethargy” and “Restlessness”. In my case this state occurs when, coupled with my eating and sleeping habits, my exercising routines also get affected by ‘busy’ periods. There is a definite and drastic drop in my energy levels, productivity and most significantly creative output. Exercise , the total routine, allows me to focus better on the bigger picture.

Breaking the exercise routine is probably one of the easiest habits to get out of, as also the most difficult to get back into, once you have left it for an extended period of time. It starts innocently enough when I miss a couple of squash games in a row. One missed day leads to another and pretty soon before I have even realized what has happened I am standing on the outside, wondering how I got there. Thats pretty much how life is, if we do not pay attention to the small changes occurring on a daily basis, very often we do not see the big hits coming. It can be difficult and confusing to undertsand how such a drastic change could come about so quickly.

To help me keep up regularly with my exercise routines I have taken some steps which have helped me stick with it during the busier times.

1. Probably one of the best things I have done is, to get a gym buddy and a regular squash partner . 

2. A commitment to myself, to keep myself in good shape, and my health, in constant check.

3. Set SMART goals, and once I achieve them, I have promised myself rewards when I hit those benchmarks. For example when I started with my squash routine I told myself if I could make it to 30 games without a break in the middle I would buy myself the really fancy racquet I wanted. The feeling of achievement after my 30th consecutive game was much more fulfilling than buying that racquet.

Apart from all the health benefits of exercise it has greatly increased my energy levels throughout the day, I feel a whole lot better about myself, it gives you a great feeling of being alive and, being fiercely competitive myself , the thrill of winning just makes my day.

Related Posts:

SMART Goals

The Gym

Sleep

“Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.” Fran Lebowitz

The world starts to blur a little, you reach a semi conscious state where you can barely see the word document open on your screen. The proposal still needs a lot of work, but you convince yourself to just close your eyes for minute, and you drift away ………for those of you who have had to pull continuous all nighters, this is a familiar state. Sleep pattern is the next point in my case which tends to go out of whack when the pressure is on. Initially it feels pretty good cutting down your usual 6 hours of sleep down to something like 4-5 hours, getting away with an extra hour or two is do-able for a short time. However extended periods of sleep deprivation can have serious side effects. 

It is a proven fact, that when the body experiences a continuous lack of sleep, the immune system starts to weaken, productivity dips and you enter a state of limbo where you just seem to be drifting along. Analyzing the situation from this angle clearly helps us realize that such a state is not desirable. Yet we continue to burn the midnight oil when the heat is on like there is no tomorrow. One of the factors it comes down to is, personality types. Some of us are pressure prompted and others just keeping plugging away day after day. If you are able to find the motivation and discipline to keep plugging away daily that is clearly the more desirable alternative.

Being a pressure prompted person myself, I have made a conscious effort to break tasks down over a longer period of time, to avoid the massive build up which occurs right before project delivery. It has helped boost my overall productivity and efficiency levels . However during extended crunch times my sleep is heavily compromised and this is another factor I am working on to bring under control. I am attempting this by putting structured routines into place and replacing some bad habits:

1. Going to sleep as soon as I cannot read a page of text without dozing off.

2. Setting my alarm clock to go off at specific time everyday. (I do no set it when I want to sleep in)

3. Taking 1 or 2 power naps of 15-20 minutes during the course of the day, depending on my level of fatigue.

4. Drastically decreasing caffeine intake during high pressure periods and switching to green tea.

Sleep is a critical component of our daily lives. I am going to make a conscious effort to stick to set routines even during turbulent periods to make sure that I am getting adequate amount of rest. This will in turn increase my overall level of productivity and efficiency while keeping my health in balance.

Related Articles:

Diets

“Strength is the ability to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands – and then eat just one of those pieces” Judith Viorst

The mood in the office is one of pandemonium. Proposals need to be sent out, a customer wants a trial of the new software tomorrow and one of the key team members has called in sick. It is one of those crazy days. During the day you get hungry at random points and reach for the quickest snack to get an energy boost. This could be chips, chocolates, burgers or pizza as opposed to other healthier alternatives. The objective at this point is to get done with the meal as quickly as possible, and get back to work. Sometimes you realize you have missed lunch and all your timings are off the chart.

If this happens once a week it is acceptable as it is part of the entrepreneurial lifestyle, where there are no fixed lunch or dinner breaks. You are so consumed with the work at hand that time no longer registers in minutes or hours, rather in the amount of work that needs to be done by a given deadline. In this frame of mind your diet is not a priority, and it starts to show. Surviving on an unhealthy diet for an extended period of time can be severely detrimental to your health. If you have not seen Super Size Me , I recommend you do so to get an idea of how bad it can be. It is not only fast food, it may even be frequent and regular meals at restaurants. Getting your diet in control before it gets out of hand is essential.

Even though I have a pretty strict diet routine, it does go off track during these crazy periods. The last few such times I have attempted the following to keep my diet in check:

1. Keep a journal of my food intake when I am off my routine. Through this method I was actually able to see where I was overdoing it and I could then consciously tell myself to lay off the junk snacks.

2. Have a standard order when eating out. This one is a tough one, especially when you are at a fancy restaurant. However keeping the fried, creamy and desserts at a minimum certainly helps. This is not to say that you should avoid that stuff all together, induldge yourself once in a while, just do not make it a habit.

3. Instead of crisps stock the office up with granola bars, fruit, fat free yogurt and nuts. 

The next time I go into one of these intense periods I am going to make sure that I keep a healthy balance about what I eat and snack on. This will defintely help keep a better shape, prevent the constant after meals stupors and affect overall health positively in the long run.

Feeling Overwhelmed?

“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.” Anonymous

I have just been through a crazy month at work. It felt like there were five hundred things to do on my list, everyday! The last couple of days I have been documenting all that was accomplished during the last month and even though we achieved a lot, I feel it came at a high price. I was reflecting about it this evening and I realized how often I go through cycles like this. I tell myself I will do more to balance my time in the future, and then it happens again. Maybe it is my nature to get everything done just right or an addiction to the adrenaline you feel when everything you are working on so hard starts to show potential. 

Over the course of this week I am going document five areas that I want and need to work on, to find balance for such periods in my life in the future. They will be simple guiding lights, reminding me constantly of the bigger picture when I am so totally engrossed at a micro level. Luckily, being an entrepreneur gives me the freedom to take off when I think the extended period of stress level is running too high. For individuals who do not have this facility, a sharper focus to rectify this imbalance is vital. High levels of stress over extended periods of time leads to eventual ‘Burnout’. 

It is essential that we do our utmost to avoid reaching such stages because that tends to lead us to do and say things which we would not, ordinarily. We all tend to have times in our life when we are maddeningly busy , how we deal with ourselves and others during this period, affects us and all those around us as well. I would like really to hear from all of you what you do to overcome it all when you are feeling overwhelmed and stressed out for extended periods of time.