Boosting Performance by Reducing Stress
Starting a business is a bold move. It usually requires far more than you ever
thought possible. Yet you still want it
– without losing everything else you hold dear.
Science indicates that simple things such as time for
breaks, hobbies, and vacations are crucial to maintain your edge as an entrepreneur.
Time for Breaks? Ha!
I know, I know – there’s no TIME for breaks. What if I said there’s no time to miss breaks?
Consider what working straight through, and during “off
hours” is stealing from you:
- Your brain rejuvenates less at night, reducing creativity and productivity
- Your family and friends don’t see you, increasing distance over time
- Your body relaxes less, increasing aches and pains (headache anyone?)
- Your energy is reduced, leading to burnout and possibly depression
The American work ethic is an interesting study in
culture. Don’t get me wrong, work is a virtue
to be sure. Yet somewhere along the way,
workaholism replaced work as a virtue.
Always “On” Syndrome
Innovation slowly
tightens the noose around your neck. Your
devices make tasks faster to accomplish.
You feel pressure to do more.
It’s easy to find yourself “always on” – checking messages and emails
through the evening and first thing in the morning.
When you work from home, any sense of getting away is
difficult. It’s easy to develop the
habit of working in the evenings and on weekends because there is always lots
to do.
Science says you might not be getting ahead of anything. In fact, you'll likely hurt your bottom line in the end.
"Staying inside, in the same location, is really
detrimental to creative thinking. It's also detrimental to doing that
rumination that's needed for ideas to percolate and gestate and allow a person
to arrive at an 'aha' moment," Kimberly Elsbach tells Jeremy Hobson, host of Here & Now.
Boosting Creativity
"We know that creativity and innovation happen when
people change their environment, and especially when they expose themselves to
a nature-like
environment, to a natural environment," says Kimberly Elsbach.
Walks at the
park or beach are incredibly restorative.
More than that, it gives your brain a chance to assimilate everything
that’s going on. By removing yourself
from work, you get a different perspective.
You’re far more creative in your solution when you give yourself the
gift of getting away from it all for a while.
Tim Kreider put it a different way. “Space and quiet … provides
a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole,
for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning
strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work
done."
Getting Away More Often
Research is showing the restorative effects of a vacation lasts a
limited amount of time. People need to
get away more often.
Jeroen Nawijn (from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and NHTV
Breda University of Applied Sciences and his team are published online in
Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality
of Life.) suggests that people are likely to derive more happiness
from two or more short breaks spread throughout the year, rather than having
just a single longer vacation once a year.
Scheduling For Success
My challenge to you is this:
schedule regular breaks during the day.
Find some time each day to sit still without thinking about everything
you need to do. Find some time each week
to get out into nature for fresh air and calm surroundings. In addition, if you
can afford it, get away for a long weekend a few times this year. Schedule this in. Your business needs it. So do you.
Weekly Challenge
Last week, I wanted to work on homework for the workshop I’ll be
attending next week. I have started into
it. There is a lot more work than
expected. This week’s challenge will be
to contact three people in my niche and interview them to learn the pain points
in that world.
What task do you need to do this week that will move your business
forward?
