5 Top Tips To Avoid Management Stress For Small Business Owners

Owning a business is stressful, and you can’t really escape it. The sooner you learn small business stress management, the better. As a serial entrepreneur, I know a lot of small business owner anxiety and stress. Here are my five tips for combating small business owner stress.

Some 35 percent of the business owners polled cited “less stress” as the biggest benefit of an improved economy. In comparison, 19 percent cited increased cash flow to invest in the business, and 17 percent say “hiring more people” is what they’re happiest about. (In other good news, 86 percent expect to be profitable in the second half of this year and 51 percent are confident they’ll surpass their 2014 revenues.)

Start with the basics.

When you’re hungry, thirsty or tired, the littlest things can seem overwhelming. If you haven’t had a drink of water in the past hour, get one. If you haven’t eaten something in the past few hours, grab a light, healthy snack like nuts or fruit. If you haven’t moved from in front of your computer for last 45 minutes, stand up and walk around your office or do some quick stretches.

Do Exercise

Studies have proven that increasing your daily physical activity is a great way to reduce stress. This doesn’t mean that you need to be in the gym two hours a day. Just about any type of physical activity can help in reducing your stress levels. Do you have 30 minutes to kill before your next meeting? Don’t sit around looking at your smartphone, go out and take a walk around your office. Take a break from work and perform five minutes of stretching every other hour to get your blood flowing.

Remember what’s going right.

As you’re building your business, it is easy to only focus on the things that are going wrong. You can become stressed when you’re looking at all the things that are behind schedule, underfunded or need to be fixed.

Rank your tasks.

One of the causes of stress in business is having so many things to work on that none of them get done. If you try to do a little bit of each task, you will complete few of them. Don’t try to do everything at once. Try to focus on one or a small number of tasks at a time.

Take a break

A 10-minute walk around the office park, stroll through the office chatting with employees or run down to the local Starbucks for coffee can do a lot to clear your head and manage stress. (Make that coffee decaf, though, if you’re already feeling frazzled.)