Stress and being a business owner or manager often go together. Are there any techniques to reduce this stress?

In my business life, stress levels have fluctuated from severe at times to hardly any at all. Low levels of stress are associated with the "good times." Everything is going smoothly: there is no shortage of sales, the organisation is running smoothly, and the bank manager is calling you about investing all that extra cash sitting in your bank account into one of their investment products. Whatever pressure there is at a time like this, it is normally about meeting production deadlines or your own targets and ambitions. And given the sense of well-being that goes with this, I'd hardly call this stress to be overly concerned about.

It's when things are going in the wrong direction that stress really starts biting. Sales aren't where they should be, cash flow is hurting or there is severe friction within the organisation.

I reckon there is positive stress and negative stress. And whether the stress is positive or negative is not so much from the cause of the pressure, but more how we react to it.

Positive stress is best seen as pressure that makes you perform better.
Negative stress is where you actually become less effective than you can be.

In general, when stress first arrives, most people will lift their game. So virtually any stress is at first positive stress. However, too much pressure for too long, and inevitably the stress turns negative. You start performing at less than your best.

This means that classifying stress is really driven by 2 factors - severity and duration. Acute stress may be severe, but of short duration. Generally this is not too harmful. Chronic stress is of long duration, and after a while even low levels of pressure can produce a state of stress that is harmful.

The enemy isn't really acute stress. Chronic stress is the killer.

One of the indicators as to whether you are over-stressed is what you are doing about it. Are you responding, reacting, or simply shutting down? Understanding this helps us to manage the problem.

There are only a few things that really help in dealing with chronic stress.

Exercise.
Exercises helps offset the effects of chronic stress on the body. It will help relieve muscle tension and promotes the release of natural endorphins that will help with a sense of well-being. Working out hard also takes your mind off the problem for a while. There is a relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind.

Taking a break.
When working in an environment of chronic stress, it is critical to take a break every now and then. To clear the mind, get some perspective, and give yourself some space. However, it is here that most people fall down in dealing with stress, because the thought is that you can't afford to take a break because of the pressure.

I have read on a number of occasions that it takes 10 days or so of a total break to relieve a severely stressed condition. How many of us have not taken a ten day break in years? If not, chronic stress is probably slowly grinding you down.

A quick tip when you can't take a break.
One of the most common causes of chronic stress is ongoing cash flow pressure on the business. Without going into what you might or should be doing about solving the cash flow problem, there is one thing you can do about the chronic stress effects. Give yourself a break.

Don't even look at making payments of accounts more than once a week. Personally, I only look at account payments on the last working day of the week. It is a habit I got into when I was feeling cash flow pressures, and I've kept it up ever since because frankly it makes my working week far more effective. For the rest of the week my priority is doing the stuff that might bring in more money. Figuring out which bills I can or cannot pay only happens on Friday.

As a related aside on this, I was fascinated listening to a guy once who was in the business rescue business. Essentially, he'd be appointed as an administrator of businesses in trouble and his job was to move them back out of the danger zone. Whilst there was some variety in the problems for each enterprise he had worked on, the common one to all was cash flow. His first step would be to call in all the creditors and offer a simple deal.

He needed the space to work the business back into profitability so that they would all eventually get their money. To achieve this, he could not afford to be continually interrupted by calls from people asking questions about when they would get their money. So from the beginning of the month until the last two working days of the month - no creditor was to call so that he could focus on the stuff that made the money. On the 25th (or first working day thereafter) of the month, he would take whatever money was available and pay whatever bills he could, spreading it around as fairly as possible. If they wanted to talk to him they could only do it in that two day window at the end of the month.

So it seems this technique might work for stressed organisations too, although I was so entranced with the fact that he was using a similar technique that I forgot to ask what his success rate was.

Have you got any little tips and techniques that you find help dealing with business stress in your life? Please share them here and help us all just that little bit more.