Seven ways to eliminate stress

- In this video, I want to talk about looking after your body and looking after your mind. Okay, so first of all, looking after your body. I mentioned in a previous video exercise and sleep. Really, really important. (laughs) I go through phases of exercise. So the first thing is to find some sort of exercise that you like. Personally, I hate running, but I like cycling. So find something that you like. And maybe plan a time of day that you're going to regularly do it. Are you gonna do it at lunchtime or perhaps in the morning before breakfast or as soon as you get home from work? And maybe have a regular day of the week, perhaps two or three days of the week where you go to the gym or something like that. And maybe get a buddy who's gonna go with you and do the exercise. That helps a lot. So get exercise sorted. That's a basic thing. All successful people get some form of exercise. Really important to do. You'll feel better in your mind. You'll feel better about your self-image. Vital to do that. And then the other thing is sleep. I'm terrible at this, because I'm an evening person. I don't really like getting up, but in the evening I feel wide awake. Midnight is probably my best time. What I tend to do is I tend to stay up late watching TV or writing stuff on my computer, Facebook, whatever. And then the next day, there I am thinking, oh, I must get to bed early tonight. And then the same thing repeats. So, we've gotta overcome this. And I think the first thing is to realize it's quite seductive to stay up late. You tend to think that you can get away with it, and you can for one or two nights in a row. And then you start thinking it doesn't matter, but of course it accumulates. And then when you go to bed early one night, it doesn't have that much effect and you start thinking, well, doesn't really make any difference, but it does. If you can go to bed early several nights in a row, you will feel so much better. So, it's really important to do that. And if TV is your personal poison, then find a way to not watch TV really late. The best thing to do probably is to just press record and go to bed, because then the next day you'll probably decide you're not gonna watch the rest of that program anyway. But there are other things you can do, like not having a look at what's on. Don't look at the schedules, so then you're not. Definitely don't surf around the channels just looking for something that's vaguely good. Only watch targeted programs. So find a way to overcome TV so that you can get more sleep. So, exercise and sleep, really important for looking after your body. Now, looking after your mind, there are a number of things you can do. Firstly, I would recommend reading. I already mentioned earlier in this program that all of the knowledge of the world is in books, and it's so important to read books. Read books on the subject of your work. So, if you're a salesperson, read some sales books, even if it's just one a year so that you can get better than the other salespeople. If you're a manager, read books on management, et cetera. But also when you're looking after your mind, try to de-stress yourself. And reading actually is quite a good way of reducing stress, because with reading you pull the information from the book at the speed you want. It's not like television, which pushes the information at you at a speed that's either too slow or too fast. So, I would say reading's a important part of de-stressing. But I've got my top seven stress reduction points I want to go through now. The first one is write everything down. Have a daily jobs to do list of what you're gonna do today, and have a master list of everything that you need to do at some point. Then you don't have to worry about forgetting stuff. So write everything down. If you find yourself trying to get to sleep and you keep thinking, oh, I need to phone that guy tomorrow, and you have a little pad by your bed, that's a sure sign of stress and it's a sure sign that you need to write everything down. 'Cause if it's written down, it won't be circulating around in your mind when you're trying to get to sleep. That's my first one. The second one is get enough sleep and exercise. We've already talked about that. My third one is saying no. Great way to reduce the amount of tress in your life is to say no to the things that you don't wanna do, that you shouldn't be doing. We've already talked about that. My fourth one is no multitasking. Don't try to do several things at once. Just write them all down on a list, and then do them one at a time. The human mind is not designed for multitasking. It's stressful and we perform worse. If you've got four five-minute jobs, it'll take you 20 minutes if you do them one at a time. If you jump between them and you keep just trying to do two at once, you'll end up spending a whole hour and not finishing them. So, no multitasking. Write a list instead. Number five in my stress list is beat procrastination. We've already talked about that. Don't procrastinate anything. Just take the worst job you've got on your list and do it. Number six is to allow a time buffer. Don't leave everything till the last minute. If you know it's gonna take you half an hour to get there, don't set out half an hour before you're meant to arrive. Set out 3/4 of an hour. If it's gonna take an hour for a meeting, don't put an hour in your parking meter. Put two hours in your parking meter. Pay the extra 20p so that you don't have the stress of having to hurry back. Always put in a time buffer. The worst that'll happen is you'll arrive early, but that's okay, because you can have fill-in work. There's things on your phone. You could have an iPad or a laptop. You can work. You can have a book to read. You can have fill-in work with you that will be great use of that extra time. So allow time buffers for everything. And last anti-stress idea is be assertive when you've got people who are stressing you out. If you've got people who are chatty, tell them, "Actually, I haven't got time "for a long chat at the moment." If there are people who irritate you, don't spend time with them. So be assertive about people. I'm gonna come back to that later on in this program. Now, just a final thought about looking after your body and your mind. It's a bit of an odd one, but it's meditation. It might be a good idea to consider meditation. Quite a lot of people I've been talking to have said to me, "Oh, yeah, I meditate," and I'm thinking, I never knew you meditated. It's actually quite a widespread practice, and it seems to becoming commoner and it's not thought of as weird anymore. So I would definitely think about meditating. There are all kinds of benefits. If you ask people what the benefits of meditation are, they often say, "Well, it's whatever you want it to be," or something like that. Or they say, "It'll make you more grounded," whatever that means. All I can say, I personally have found two benefits to meditating. I don't do it as often as I should, but I sometimes do it. And one of the benefits is it makes me more creative. After I've done it, I feel this surge of sort of, sounds odd, but almost creative power. It's like my brain has been restarted. You know how when you restart your computer, it runs really fast and really smoothly. So, it's a bit like rebooting your mental computer. So, it makes me more creative and energetic, and that's one benefit I've had to it. But the other thing is I find it's given me more self-discipline. It's given me more control over my thought processes. So, something like impatience, I can now just think, actually, I'm not gonna feel impatient about that. And I can just switch off the little voice in my mind that's going, (mutters) "There's a long queue. "I don't wanna wait." So, it's given me more control over the little voice in my head, and I think that's a brilliant thing. So that's been what I've gained from it. But I would urge you to try meditation. I haven't got time here to go into a lot of detail about how you do it, but it is basically easy. You just need to find a quite room with no interruptions, sit on a chair that's not too comfortable, 'cause you don't wanna fall asleep. Just sit on a normal hard chair, upright. Probably shut your eyes. And sit there for 15 minutes. Put a timer on for 15 minutes and think about nothing. That's the hard bit, actually, to think about nothing. 'Cause what will happen if you just sit with your eyes shut in a quiet room is that loads of thoughts will crowd into your mind. But if you just let them subside, just say to yourself, "I'm not gonna get involved in all these thoughts," and just wait till they subside, then you'll find that the little voices in your head will gradually calm down and then suddenly, bing, the timer will go, and you'll think, what? Is that 15 minutes? It's almost as if you've been asleep, but you haven't. Your mind has just been blank and you've zoomed through the 15 minutes. So, probably three or four or five minutes for the voices to subside, and then the next 10 minutes just goes. Now, what some people do to push the voices out of their head is they have a mantra that they say over and over again. So you could just say, "Calm, calm, calm." You could just keep saying that. And every time a voice comes in about, "What about the meeting tomorrow?" Calm. And it will just push the voices out of your head until suddenly the 15 minutes is gone. And at the time you may think, well, I've just wasted 15 minutes sitting on this chair with my eyes shut, but actually you haven't, 'cause you'll have that energy, you'll have that mental control. Ideally, 15 minutes every day if you could do it at some suitable time of day if you can find a suitable quiet place. I would definitely urge you to try meditation. It is actually brilliant. So, that's the end of that video. Consider looking after your body, looking after your mind, reducing your stress, and meditation.