Four easy tips to mitigate modern-day stress from an entrepreneur and meditation expert

For two decades I lived under the soul-crushing stress that comes from being a cog in the business world, and I manically kept up with the round-the-clock pressure of being an entrepreneur and leader too. But there’s one thing I realised after spending my 20s, 30s, and some of my 40s in this cycle, it’s not only a bad way to live, it’s bad for business.

The good news is, you can be a corporate executive or an entrepreneur without burning the candle at both ends. 

When I embarked on my own journey twenty years ago to try and better manage the overwhelming stress I was experiencing in my life, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. I tried everything, from hot yoga to health retreats and everything in between. But none of them felt sustainable.

Sound familiar?

Through it all, I found myself intuitively and repeatedly drawn to meditation, eventually being introduced to Vedic Meditation in my late 30s. The game changed for good. I’d finally found a simple way to step back from the chaos of life — and importantly, lean into myself — that didn’t require me to change myself or alter my lifestyle, to commit to a daily practice. It quickly became a refuge for me.

I hear what you’re saying, “But I’m too busy to meditate!”. It’s one of the biggest meditation myths around. When we say that, it’s invariably coming from a place of immense stress and overwhelm. The time is there, and the fact that we think there’s no time is actually more a reflection of our levels of stress than anything else.

Why are we all so stressed

It’s easy to blame our jobs and spouses, kids, overflowing inboxes, or our smartphones for all the stress in our lives. And while it’s true that actively paring back external stressors can help mitigate surface stress, at its core, the root cause of stress is possibly a collective one. 

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Collectively, we are overtired and overworked, we’ve forgotten who we really are, our essential nature: creative, well-rested, well-nourished, loved and loving, dynamic human beings. We’re not on this planet to have a bad time! It’s just a case of ‘mistaken identity’, a collective forgetfulness. In a business, stress can be contagious, if the person leading a meeting, or addressing a board of directors is overwhelmed, and running on empty, that feeling can permeate through an entire room or an entire company.

Leading stress-free from the top down can have an incredible effect on the success or failure of a business, and can be the deciding factor in staff retention. Leaders have a responsibility to minimise and manage their stress levels for the good of themselves and others around them.   

Is there a right amount of stress to feel

 Most of us understand that our fundamental, biological ‘stress’ response is important if we’re going to fight the bear, freeze, or run for our lives. The application of stress when it’s needed is vital. We could also argue that the stress response is maladaptive, and for the enlightened sage, this would be true. However, 99.999% of us are having a human experience so being stressed is okay, at times. 

But too much, too often, too consistently means that our bodies are constantly flooded with the stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol, our heart rate and blood pressure are impacted, and so on. It’s why chronic stress leads to inflammation, which leads to disease.

In today’s fast-paced world, you’re not going to avoid stress. There’s always stuff going on. But you do have a fundamental choice in how you manage it. 

My top four tips for dealing with stress

If you are committed to reducing the amount of stress you feel in your life and in turn improving your business, introducing some straightforward ways in which to help you achieve that is a no-brainer.

Practice Vedic Meditation

Vedic Meditation for twenty minutes, twice a day, enables and empowers you to reset, regroup, and revitalise. It’s been said that twenty minutes of meditation has a similar effect on your body to sleep. Reclaim your essence, twenty minutes at a time! There are 72 twenty minute slots in the day, and trust me, once you start you’ll see how easy it is to maintain. There is a reason CEOs like Bill Gates and Ariana Huffington swear by meditation.

Change your physiology

This doesn’t have to mean circuit training or a 5km run. Changing your physiology can be as simple as standing up from your desk and having a good stretch, or stepping outside to admire the sunset. When you move your body as much as you can every day, it will change the way you feel.

Nourish your body with food

This is not new news; you are literally a product of what you eat! Diets of fast, fatty, processed foods and alcohol have been proven to factor into a range of modern diseases including type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, and depression, to name a few. Good food feeds a healthy body and mind.  

Repeat

These steps sound simple because they are simple. If all else fails and you don’t feel as though they are happening naturally for you, just meditate twice daily and the rest of the steps will then take care of themselves.

Nicho Plowman is a Vedic meditation teacher and co-founder of the Insight Timer meditation app.