So you’ve been busy for at least a year straight…

No matter where you are in the world, what you do and who you are, I can guarantee that you have felt stressed and chances are you still are. You might have even felt anxiety, frustration, overwhelm, sadness or all of the above.

Being an entrepreneur is stressful, but nowadays, just being a person is also stressful

Being an entrepreneur is stressful, specially in the initial stages, but all of a sudden, just being a person is also stressful. Whether you have been working, overworked or out of work, confined alone or with a full house, not confined at all, restricted to stay in, forced to go out scared, happy to stay indoors, sick of staying indoors, happy to go out or scared to go out… whoever you are and no matter what your circumstances are and were during the last year, I can feel your pain.

I can bet anything on millions of people having felt the same way you have. Does this make it less special or less relevant? Not at all. If anything, it makes you human.

In this post, I will try to share different ways that help me disconnect, in the hopes that they will help you too.

There’s always something to stress about. There was a time when I started to look at ways in which you could find the pieces of the puzzle that was missing. And little did I know that we just had to let go. For some reason we are accustomed to chase rainbows and whenever we think we are close to them, they disappear and leave us wanting more chasing.

These are the strategies that help me disconnect

The first strategy is based on breathing exercises. If I am looking to quickly de-stress and bring my heart rate down, this is my go-to strategy. It’s like a lifeline that is there whenever I need it. It’s like my emergency call. I use my breathe app on my iWatch. If you don’t have this available, set your timer to one minute and consciously breathe into your stomach on the count of six and then breathe out on the same count. Do this until your one minute is up. If you feel you need another minute or two to calm down, just repeat it again or as many times as you need. Do the effort of mentally counting and bringing the air down into your stomach, because this is what will keep your mind off anything else that is troubling you.

What I learnt though is that there’s is no chasing to make you happy. Happiness happens now, not anytime in the future. It is a choice we make every day. With this principle in mind, these are the strategies that I’ve gathered through the years and that I’ve proven to help me disconnect. I use them depending on my mood at the time, the situation I am in at that particular moment, and on what I am looking to accomplish (momentum, relaxation, connection with my inner self to make a decision, etc.).

Another similar way of doing this, if I can’t pay attention to a timer at the moment, I hold one of my bracelets and I start counting the beads in it. Again, the counting it’s what makes you put your mind into something else other than what is stressing you at that very moment.

Digital detox. Every once in a while (every couple of weeks or three, I put myself through what I can a “digital detox”. This means staying off anything digital for a day. If you find it hard, you can try for half a day (from when you wake up until lunch time of from lunch time until you go to bed). If you have trouble staying away from digital distractions, you can uninstall the apps from your phone that beep the most or that show the most notifications throughout the day.

Another way of forcing yourself to stay away from phone notifications is to go for a walk leaving your phone at home, and substituting it for a book, a notebook, and a pen or an mp3 player. As a substitute you can basically bring anything that is not your phone and that will require your full attention (music, writing, reading, drawing, etc.).

If you feel you have really no time for a walk, think that you can step out for 10 minutes (time it and it will feel like an eternity!), even it it is right outside your building or even standing right next to a window and staring outside!

One thing that is the last one on my list of things that help me disconnect is TV. And it’s last on my list because of a reason: there are better options (every one of the above). However, sometimes you just feel like passively disconnecting.

From time to time, I feel like disconnecting by staring at something, so I don’t have to be involved in it. I don’t beat myself up about it anymore. It is what it is and it’s not that often at all, so that is ok. In this case, I set rules for myself: it has to be on TV (not computer or cell phone) and it has to be something “braindead”, like a silly comedy, or music videos, or tv shows compilation videos. Whatever it is, I shouldn’t judge the content or experiment any negative feeling while watching. It’s not there for me to judge, it’s there for me to keep me distracted and to think about something else, therefore no documentaries, webinars, drama movies or anything I can learn from. The goal is to fully disconnect my conscious thinking.

Whichever way helps you disconnect, the goal is usually that your heart rate goes down, you breathe deeply, your posture is naturally confident and relaxed so that you feel sure about the present and hopeful about the future.

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