In this 20‑minute video, Matt Vaadi of ERG HR explains why workplace stress is a major problem for Americans and offers a comprehensive, actionable toolkit for reducing it. He begins by highlighting the ripple effects of stress on health, relationships, and productivity, then walks through a series of concrete strategies: (1) adopting a robust organization system such as David Allen’s Getting Things Done and “swallow the frog” prioritization; (2) carving out short reading breaks to refresh the mind; (3) protecting time for regular exercise and planning healthy meals, including bulk‑cooking and nearby go‑to options; (4) dressing comfortably and creating a pleasant workspace, aided by music; (5) using the Pomodoro technique or other structured break cycles to maintain focus; (6) prioritizing sleep hygiene with consistent bedtime routines; (7) practicing intentional breathing—guided meditation for daily grounding and box breathing for acute stress spikes; and (8) cultivating a positive mindset, emphasizing that reactions shape outcomes. Throughout, Matt shares personal anecdotes (e.g., his own exercise schedule despite a busy family) to illustrate feasibility. He ends by encouraging viewers to comment, share their own tips, and follow ERG’s social channels.
Chapters
Hey everybody, this is Matt with ERG, and today we're going to talk about a topic that's super important to me, and that's how to deal with stress at work. Stress at work is one of the number one problems for Americans right now. More than 65% of people say they deal with a high level of stress related to work. I don't think it needs to be that way. I think there are a lot of things we can do to help ourselves to minimize that stress and ultimately improve our health, our relationships, our relationships with coworkers, family, friends. The negative ripple effect from stress at work can be overwhelming. It can go well beyond the walls of work and into our home life and into our communities and into our relationship with our family and friends. So today I've got some great tips to help you to minimize that stress that you're dealing with at work and make your life better and the people around you's life better as well. Oftentimes when I see somebody at work who's really stressed, I notice that they're not very organized, or they think they're organized, but but they're really having trouble prioritizing how to get work done. So having a system beyond just a to-do list is really important when it comes to staying organized at work. And that means having a system that allows you to put the most important things at the top of your to-do list and leave everything out for the day that doesn't need to be done that day. I suggest the Getting Things Done method by David Allen. You can check that out, just run a quick search on Amazon and you'll be able to find his book. But either way, take the time at the beginning of the day to Organize and prioritize your day and block out time for those things that are super important. We talk about swallowing the frog at ERG. If you're not familiar with this term from Mark Twain, he talks about doing your most important tasks first. Mark Twain famously said, "If you've got two frogs to swallow, swallow the biggest, ugliest one first, and then it gets easier from there." So prioritize your day and stay organized. Next up is another simple one: read a book. Block out a few minutes first thing in the morning to read something that is enriching to you, that's putting you in the right mindset and gets you ready for the day. And even put in some time around maybe lunch or one of your breaks in the afternoon, or take a break if you haven't been taking them, and just read for a few minutes. Sometimes this can be to escape, you can be reading fiction. Sometimes it's just to sharpen the saw, you're reading nonfiction. Whatever it is, block out a little bit of time during the day, take 5 minutes to read a book. Nobody's going to miss you for those 5 minutes, and you'll be better off for it. So the next two I see people do all the time. Once you start to get super busy at work and start to get stressed out, your diet and your exercise seem to be one of the first things that go downhill. So make sure that you're blocking out time to exercise, whether before work, during the middle of the workday, or after work. And I know so many people tell me, oh, there's just no time, there's just no time. Well, I still manage to get in about 5 to 6 hours of exercise time every single week, and I run multiple companies, have a family with two young kids, so I don't believe you when you say there's not time. You can carve out the time if you want to make the time for it. And the same goes for eating healthy. One of the other things we tend to do when we get stressed out is to make bad decisions. So it's a lot easier to run out of the office and go get some McDonald's or some lousy fast food instead of knowing where those good places are to eat, or even just getting the salad from the fast food place. Um, I suggest mapping out kind of two or three healthy meals that are close to your office that can be your go-tos if you need to get out of the office and go to a restaurant. But also, pack your lunch, bring it in, go outside and eat it during lunch. I do suggest getting away from your desk for lunch and making sure that you actually get a mental break, but go outside, eat a lunch that you packed. And if you prepare food en masse on Sunday, um, I like to do bulk cooking. I cook off a bunch of chicken, a bunch of rice, vegetables, and then I can pack up several lunches for throughout the week. That helps me to remove the stress of having to deal with what am I am I going to eat during the week, and also helps me to stay healthy and eat a balanced diet. So we talked about getting out of the office. The other thing is when you're in the office, be comfortable. So two things that you can do to be comfortable. First of all, dress comfortably. Now I know even if you have a business casual environment, obviously we dress a little bit on the more casual side, but if you have a business casual environment, there are so many great things that you can wear nowadays that keep it pretty comfortable and still business casual. I see men wearing shoes all the time that have sneaker soles on them, but they're dress shoes. Same for women. And there's, you know, slacks that are more comfortable than windbreaker pants sometimes, and shirts that fit and kind of move with us, athletic fit. There's all sorts of great clothes that you can get without breaking the budget that will also keep you comfortable. Now secondarily, create a comfortable workspace around you. Get some music on. Listening to music has been proven to reduce your stress level while you're at work. And there's even some techniques that say that if you listen to the same song over and over again, that actually helps you to be more productive. I've tried it. While it can get a little bit monotonous, it is strangely satisfying. And so definitely listen to some music and dress comfortably. So I talked about taking breaks, you know, and organization and time management. One method that's becoming more and more popular is called the Pomodoro method. So the Pomodoro method means that I work hard, focused energy for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. And then I can break up my day into 30-minute increments where I'm getting adequate breaks throughout the day. So during that 5 minutes, I can read a book, play a game, do a puzzle, any of those things. Or if you don't like that method, it doesn't work best for you, that's great, but still make sure you're carving out some time. You know, for example, I know we have a lot of friends who are CPAs and accountants. This time of year, it sure is great to have a deck of cards around so you can play a game of Uno with a teammate, get a puzzle out, a board game that you can play over multiple days and keep in one of the break rooms, and just allow Allow yourself that mental break to step away for a few moments, decompress, and give yourself something else to think about. A big challenge for me used to be getting enough sleep as things got more stressful. I would stay up late, worry about things, or I'd be working really late and then I would just want to decompress and scroll through NFL Twitter on my phone late at night and stay up later than I wanted to. But have a hard-set bedtime where you're going to be in bed, you're going to eliminate the screens, you're going to get the white noise on, whatever your recipe is. And you can run a lot of Google searches around ways to prepare yourself for a better night's sleep, but your body needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night. Give it the sleep it needs. You're not doing anybody any favors by working late nights, sleeping 4 to 5 hours. You'll be much more productive and have to work less hours if you get yourself a good night's rest. And that brings me into the next piece, which is breathing. So breathing, while we have to do it every second of every day, there are some more calculated ways to breathe. So guided meditations are proven to reduce your stress levels dramatically. You can simply Google guided meditation, get some recorded ones, pop in some earbuds, sit in a chair or on the floor first thing in the morning for 10 minutes, and this will relax you so much and get your mind ready for the busy day by clearing it out and giving you a clear head for your day to help you to focus on what's most important and be able to prioritize as we discussed earlier. Next up with breathing, there's another technique called box breathing, and this is 4-count in, hold for a 4-count, 4-count out, hold for a 4-count, and repeat over and over. So this is really good when you hit a very stressful moment in the day. So customer calls you, is very angry and rude to you, that's when you want to break out the box breathing, and you want to get away from your desk and decompress for just a moment in those high-stress moments throughout the day. Guided meditation sets you up for a successful day. Box breathing when something goes haywire during the day. And finally, approach the day with a positive mindset. You know, one of our core values at ERG is life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. And so if you come into the day expecting the worst and expecting to be stressed and expecting that bad things are gonna happen, guess what's gonna happen? A whole bunch of bad things. So come into the day with positive intent and understand and look for the great things that happen throughout the day. You know you've been around these people with a positive mindset before, and it's electric, and you're going to not only make your day better, but you're going to positively influence somebody else in your office or in your family or on your team and help make their day better and eliminate some of their stress. So you can be that positive change that's going to help other people. I hope that some of these tips will help you to reduce some of the stress at your work, and please leave a comment. Let us know what did or didn't work out for you and what other tips you use when you're trying to reduce stress at work. My name is Matt Vaity. I'm with ER RG Payroll and HR. Check us out on our other social channels, or make sure you subscribe and get some of our up-to-date videos on other great topics related to human resources. Thanks for joining me.
