Are you trying to figure out how to deal with stress at work? Then trust me, you’re not alone! Thousands of Americans are affected by work related stress on a daily basis, and a constant barrage of this stress could cause severe instability in your life.
Yes of course, many people like to say that “it’s just stress” and you should just let it pass by. But how long are you going to wait before realizing that this waiting game is never ending?
The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has stated, “If stress becomes persistent and low-level, however, all parts of the body’s stress apparatus (the brain, heart, lungs, blood vessels, and muscles) become chronically over-activated or under-activated. Such chronic stress may produce physical or psychological damage over time.”
This simply means that stress over time is not going to get better, and will actually only get worse unless you take action for dealing with stress at work.
There are many different ways deal with work stress. The first step? You have to admit to yourself that the stress is becoming a burden. Once you’ve convinced yourself.. go ahead and try out some of the stress relieving techniques below –
Start your day with a couple of basic moves to relax your body.
Exercise and stretching techniques go well together when it comes to dealing with stress at work. These two techniques are great for you to use outside of work and even during your breaks.
This doesn’t mean you need to go out and get an expensive gym membership, nor is there the need for extra finances being spent on equipment either because you can do these exercises with your own body weight.
Body weight training is simple and effective. Two great exercises to perform are push-ups and squats. Both of these exercises help release hormones in your body that suppress stress related mental blocks, and they are great for getting your body in better shape!
Push-ups exercise your entire upper body from your shoulders down to your stomach, and then squats tighten up your legs and midsection. Beat stress and look sexy? Hell yes!
So how do you go about actually doing these exercises? A great idea is to make the most of the morning hours. When you wake up and start to dread about the work day – take a deep breath, smile you yourself and then all you have to do is:
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These three basic techniques are going to get your body warmed up and refreshed for the challenges of your work day that are still to come! Be sure to eat a decent breakfast to give your body further energy that lasts throughout the day.
Stretching techniques have been used for centuries by various cultures to ease the body and mind of physical and mental stress. Stretching could simply be rolling your head from left to right in order to relieve the tension in your brain cavities due to headaches caused by stress, or it could be more advanced techniques such as yoga!
Physiologically, yoga relaxes the body and mind. Yoga combines breathing and stretching techniques into an advanced, fluid motion of moving from one motion to another. You don’t need a class to perform the basics. Simply look up a few stretches and do them at home or at work.
Take a couple of minutes to breath. Go outside if you can.
Take a moment away from your busy schedule; take in a deep breath, and then exhale. Have you noticed that by doing so your body just naturally feels more relaxed and ready to take on the remaining work tasks? This is because every time you take in a slow, deep breath you send a chemical message to your brain. This message is to alert your brain that something is wrong, and then the brain takes the message and sends it via your nervous system to the rest of your body, which causes the relaxing feeling to occur.
The best part about using breathing techniques when it comes to coping with stress at work is that it’s free! No need for equipment and you can perform it anywhere you want, and to deal with any stressful situation at work. “Those things that happen when you are stressed, such as increased heart rate, fast breathing, and high blood pressure, all decrease as you breathe deeply to relax.”^
Make sure B-vitamins are a good part of your daily nutrition. You will find it very helpful when it comes to dealing with stress at work. Dr Manny Alvarez has stated that, “B vitamins are known to promote proper functioning of the brain and nervous system, as well as help induce relaxation and fight fatigue.” All you have to do is make sure that you eat foods that are high in B-vitamins such as nuts and eggs – preferably in the morning when your body has just been fasted while you were asleep.
Dealing with stress at work just becomes cumbersome and tiring, and you understandably just want to start pulling your hair out. But hey, take a deep breath… and before you go crazy trying to figure out how to deal with stress at work – take an active approach. The methods shown above will help you get lead a better quality life with much less stress. Work is always going to be there so long as you have bills to pay, and a stomach to feed but stress doesn’t have to come with the package.
Taking an inactive approach only leads to depression, anxiety, and body fatigue, which only gets worse every day that passes on. Money is never an issue because most things you can do to prevent work related stress is free! So what do you think? Are you ready to change your life for the better?
Also learn how to deal with stress at work during pregnancy.
Do you have any tips on how to deal with stress and pressure at work? Do share – I’d love to know your thoughts.
^Murray MT, Pizzorno JE Jr (2006). Stress management. In JE Pizzorno Jr, MT Murray, eds., Textbook of Natural Medicine, 3rd ed., vol. 1, pp. 701–708. St. Louis: Churchill Livingstone.
A 2017 Identity Fraud Study by Javelin Strategy & Research revealed that nearly one in three consumers notified that their data has been breached became victims of identity fraud. With the recent Equifax cyberattack still fresh in our minds, more than 145 million Americans’ names, addresses, birthdates, social security numbers and other sensitive information may be at risk. Cybercriminals are clever and constantly exploring ways to swipe your personal information. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported that phishing plots continue to lead its “dirty dozen” list of 2017 tax scams.
So what is the average American to do?
The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) have once again joined forces to help consumers remain safe during tax season with tips for identifying cyber scams, actionable online safety steps and what to do if you fall victim to tax identity theft. To download their informational report, click below:
CLICK HERE: Tax-Time-Tip-sheet-2018
On Monday, February 12th, TheHackerNews reported that the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics taking place in South Korea was disrupted following a malware attack before and during the opening ceremony on Friday. Travis Day of ARRC Technology stated in response to the attack, “It is a DDoS (distributed denial of service) and is common for large scale events like the Olympics. The new threat on the rise is cryptojacking and its replacing ransomware on the threat landscape as explained in a recent article with Wired.com.”
The cyber attack coincided with 12 hours of downtime on the official website for the Winter Games, the collapse of Wi-Fi in the Pyeongchang Olympic stadium and the failure of televisions and internet at the main press center, leaving attendees unable to print their tickets for events or get venue information.
The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee confirmed Sunday that a cyber attack hit its network helping run the event during the opening ceremony, which was fully restored on 8 am local time on Saturday—that’s full 12 hours after the attack began.
Multiple cybersecurity firms published reports on Monday, suggesting that the cause of the disruption was “destructive” wiper malware that had been spread throughout the Winter Games’ official network using stolen credentials.
Dubbed “Olympic Destroyer” by the researchers at Cisco Talos, the wiper malware majorly focuses on taking down networks and systems and wiping data, rather than stealing information.
The Talos researchers would not comment on attribution, but various security experts have already started attributing the Olympic Destroyer malware to hackers linked to either North Korea, China or Russia.
According to the analysis by Cisco Talos, the attacker had intimate knowledge of the Pyeongchang 2018 network’s systems and knew a “lot of technical details of the Olympic Game infrastructure such as username, domain name, server name, and obviously password.”
“The other factor to consider here is that by using the hard-coded credentials within this malware it’s also possible the Olympic infrastructure was already compromised previously to allow the exfiltration of these credentials,” researchers said.
The Olympic Destroyer malware drops two credential stealers, a browser credential stealer and a system stealer, to obtain required credentials and then spreads to other systems as well using PsExec and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), two legitimate Windows administration tools used by network admins to access and carry out actions on other PCs on a network.
The researchers noted that both built-in tools were also abused by the Bad Rabbit ransomware and NotPetya wiper malware last year.
Once installed, the malware then first deletes all possible “shadow” copies of files and Windows backup catalogs, turn off recovery mode and then deletes system logs to cover its tracks and making file recovery difficult.
“Wiping all available methods of recovery shows this attacker had no intention of leaving the machine useable. The sole purpose of this malware is to perform destruction of the host and leave the computer system offline,” reads the Talos blog post.
It’s difficult to accurately attribute this cyber attack to a specific group or nation-state hackers due to sparse of technical evidence to support such a conclusion as well as hackers often employing techniques to obfuscate their operations.
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First, read what a Managed Service Provider is before you take a deeper look into how an MSP protects your company. And here’s Part 2: The Human Element, if you missed it.
Here are the more advanced threats that can harm your company, and why an MSP is your best option.
According to Google, malware (short for “malicious software”) is software that is intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems. It can include phishing threats, viruses, ransomware, spyware, etc. Back in the day, malware was very simple. Many attacks came from curious hackers who weren’t out to make money but just to see what they could do. Nowadays, with ransomware and other digital money-making opportunities, malware has become exponentially more vicious. As technology rockets forward, so do the cyberthreats. And the more advanced malware gets, the less likely you can fight it on your own.
How an MSP protects you: Think of an MSP as your own digital army. Now your business is protected by consistent monitoring and professionals who can fight those cyber-battles for you. You won’t have to worry about whether or not you’re keeping up with the latest in cybersecurity because your network is protected at all times. Partnering with an MSP takes the worry out of your mind and allows you to focus on your business, not your technology.
Hand-in-hand with malware, hackers are the human component behind cyberattacks. Someone has to program that evil bot, right? Now that there’s some serious money to be made in the hacking business, everyone with half a brain is trying to get into it. And with heavy competition like that, it’s a perfect environment to breed rockstar hackers. And the bad news is, the more advanced they get, the more help the average business owner will need to protect themselves.
How an MSP protects you: Just like with malware, having an MSP partner takes the stress off your shoulders. With your network being monitored 24/7, any kind of attack will be spotted before it can do damage. And, even better, your network won’t have the common vulnerabilities that most do. The usual holes that hackers exploit won’t exist in your network, meaning your business flies under the radar of most attacks. Your equipment will be updated, your software will be patched regularly, your network will be solidified, and you can sleep easy at night knowing your company is safe.
