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Get started with stress management by choosing and using one or more of the following low- and no-cost stress management strategies. Practice regularly, even on days when you don't feel stressed. Eventually, these tools will feel familiar and help you to tackle your to-do list with more calm and focus.

"The pandemic has intensified many stress points for faculty and academic librarians while highlighting existing issues with how academic work is structured ..."

It’s no secret that our emotional state can affect our learning abilities, and although a bit of anxiety about an exam or upcoming assignment is normal, when that stress builds up too much, it can hinder our ability to take in, process, and store new information. Unfortunately, anxiety is on the rise among students, and... Read More

You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded -- the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."

Emily Irish

Say you’re a high performer who's risen through the ranks. Now you have even bigger responsibilities. Or you're working your way toward a promotion and need to show your skills and professionalism in the best light. Then the phone call comes. The results of your medical tests weren't good. Or you suddenly have to take care of a loved one in an emergency. Or there's an unexpected financial hit that could spell catastrophe.

Whatever the situation, your life just got much more complicated. While intuitively you know that these things can happen to anyone, the anxiety of dealing with such troubling events, coupled with the pressure to continue to perform in your job, amps up the stress to DEFCON 1.

"A curveball like that requires sharpening your coping skills and expanding them so that you can deal with what’s being demanded of you," says clinical psychologist Alicia H. Clark, adjunct professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. And there is a strategic approach you can take to help you cope and perform better, even when you’re operating under extreme stress.

Meditation might be as effective as medication in treating anxiety, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Stress is basically our response to all hindrances or negative situations that come into our life. Nowadays, we are so used to stress taking control of our daily activities and even our thoughts because we cling to the fact that we cannot escape from it.

Stress can be debilitating, paralyzing, and generally bad for our health. It can also motivate us to get organized, try new things, and push to higher levels of achievement. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford, thinks we spend too much time worrying about stress and not enough harnessing it to learn and grow. “I

Worrying about deadlines, work flow or employee issues is natural for people working in the business world. Stress happens. You have options, though, on how you deal with stress.

Sometimes, taking a moment to recenter yourself is all you need to do: By putting things into perspective, you can find the grit to keep going. That’s not always the best course of action, though. If you find that a particular task or job regularly leaves you feeling overwhelmed, drained or quietly angry, you may want to rethink how you approach the work or even consider whether you’d be better suited for a different sort of job or different company.

Feeling stressed lately? Chances are you're not alone. We carry varying degrees of stress around with us all the time—sometimes more, sometimes less. Does that pressure make us more productive or less? As with so many aspects of human psychology, the answer is: It depends. But what it depends on is something called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, a theory that dates back to 1908. Here's how understanding it can help you channel the stress you may be feeling into energy to get things done.

The Yerkes-Dodson curve relates the amount of motivational energy, called "arousal," a person may possess to how well they'll perform at a given task. The basic idea is that at low levels of arousal, people don't perform particularly well. In this state, people aren't all that motivated to get much done. That helps explain why being totally stress-free can breed laziness or complacency, and also why some of your most productive days are those when the clock is ticking for you to wrap up a big projec

Sometimes we need to escape our stress before our stress takes us down.