How to tackle RESTLESSNESS/ANXIETY & improve PRODUCTIVITY

Do you often feel a shortage of time at work? Are you always in a hurry to finish things off? Has this resulted a general sense of restlessness in you?

The fast-paced lives we are leading often leads to anxiety getting ingrained in our very system. We even find it difficult to enjoy the times when we have nothing to do, as we try to fill leisure time too with ‘something productive’. Thoughts of what we need to do after the leisure time gets over constantly hover in our mind. This leads to drain of energy in worry and anxiety that makes you desire frequent breaks to calm down.

This restlessness can be dealt with a conscious mind.

After recognizing that restlessness has hit you in a particular moment, take a step back. Perform two tasks: Firstly, see whether you should actually be doing what you are doing. Many a times we sift from one task to another without giving much thought and hence do not take up tasks in priority. This wastes precious time and adds on to stress. Secondly, after you have identified the correct task to do at the moment, determine the time duration for which you should be doing that task. This will send a signal to your brain that it needs to be involved in that particular activity, say, for the next one-hour. Now, it makes a transition from the restlessness of ‘I need to finish this ASAP’ to ‘I have the next one hour to finish this off’. This calms the system down. Also, you will find that most of the times, the task does get finished within the allotted time.

Break your day into sub-activities and do each of them with relaxation. With your mind well-informed of what is expected out of it for the next half to one hour, it will concentrate on the task at hand and will not go adrift, thus increasing efficiency. With this relaxed state, it will need breaks less frequently. But, when you recognize that it does need a break, allot it a planned duration, so that it knows that for the next 10 or 15 minutes, it can relax. The quality of relaxation would improve as it will not be anxious every minute that it needs to resume work.