10 Stress-Relieving Techniques for the New Year

Table of ContentsView All

View All

Table of Contents

Sleep Better

Invest in Your Social Circle

Get More Music in Your Life

Cull Your Clutter

Learn Some Quick Stress-Relief Strategies

Choose a Long-Term Stress Relief Practice

Cultivate Optimism

Reduce Job Stress

Make a Plan for the Future

Around the first of the year, most of us begin focusing on improving our lives. While resolutions often center on developing new habits that will get us into better physical shape—eating more nutritious foodsandgetting exercisegenerally top most people’s lists of goals for the new year— reducing stress and getting into better mental and emotional shape can provide huge rewards.

This year, consider incorporating new habits to reduce stress and increase happiness and overall life satisfaction. Here are some important steps you can take to be happier, healthier, and more relaxed in the new year.

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Being sleep deprived can be both a cause and an effect of being stressed. While stress can keep people up at night, continually operating on too few hours of sleep can increase your risk of a variety of health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. It can also lead to you being less productive.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, healthy adults need at least 7 hours of sleep each night. Sleeping less than this is associated with impaired performance, increased errors, and greater risks of accidents.

How to Ditch Poor Sleep Hygiene

While you may have been involved in sports and other fun activities as a child or young adult, it’s important to keep learning, growing, and doing things you enjoy throughout your adult life.

Top 10 Stress-Relieving Hobbies

The company you keep can significantly impact your quality of life. Good friends and close family can celebrate with you during your best times and support you through your worst. A social network of healthy relationships can be a buffer against stress and provide many other benefits.

This year, focus on strengthening your relationships. And don’t be afraid tolet go of those relationshipsthat drain you. Separating yourself from the drama and stress of those relationships opens you up to new people and new experiences.

All relationships are not created equal. Conflicted relationships can cause additional stress and frustration and even affect your health.

How Social Support Contributes to Psychological Health

Listening to music is an easy way to elevate your mood and change your energy. Music with a slow tempo—especially slow, quiet classical music—is known for its relaxing effects. Not only can it quiet your mind and relax your muscles, but it can also lower your body’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

You can play some classical tunes while you get dressed in the morning, listen to your favorite song during your morning commute, or relax to a soul-filled ballad at the end of a long day. Regardless of what you choose, music can calm you down even during stressful times.

How to Use Music for Stress Relief

Without some regular purging, your drawers and closets can get so jam-packed that it becomes almost impossible to find the items you actually want and need. Living in a cluttered space may also be causing you more stress than you realize. Not only does it decrease productivity, but it also drains your wallet and robs you of time.

This year, take some weight off of your shoulders and make a dedicated effort to get more organized. Whether it’s putting things into storage, reorganizing, or donating what you no longer need.

Shooting for perfection isn’t necessary—start small and make gradual changes. Even small reductions in clutter can create a tangible difference in how you feel.

How to Declutter Your Home

Stressful situations can culminate quickly. You can go from feeling fine to overwhelmed in a very short period of time. When this happens, it’s not always possible to simply stop what you’re doing and get amassage, go into achild’s pose, or do some other time-consuming, stress-relieving activity.

Having a few quick stress relief strategies can be helpful to turn off yourfight or flight responseand trigger yourrelaxation response.

18 Effective Stress Relief Strategies

How you view the world (or a particular situation) can greatly impact your stress levels.Negative self-talkand having a negative point of view can cause significant amounts of stress.

Fortunately, your point of view can be changed with practice. How much happier, more productive, and less stressed could you be if you omitted some self-defeating thought patterns and replaced them withpositive self-talk?

Quiz: How Much of an Optimist Are You?

Regardless of what kind of work you do, workplace stress can negatively impact your emotional andphysical health. According to a team of Harvard and Stanford researchers, stressful jobs might even lower your life expectancy.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to examine your work situation and see what changes you can make to your work life a little easier. This may include finding ways to increase your productivity, changing certain aspects of your job, adding to your life outside of work, or even examining whether you’re in the right field.

9 Ways to Cope With Work Stress and Avoid Burnout

When you’re feeling stressed, thinking beyond today and into the future can be overwhelming—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, taking some time to think about your goals and dreams for your future can give you more to look forward to and inform the resolutions you make this year and next.

Do you have a strong financial plan in place? Are you expressing yourself as fully as you’d like? Are you on the path to where you’d really like to be with your relationships and personal growth?

While new year’s resolutions are about deciding what you want in the coming year, consider thinking about a 3-, 5-, or even a 10-year plan for your personal life, too. Your plan certainly doesn’t need to be set-in-stone blueprint, but rather an idea of where you’d like to be in the future so you can be growing in that direction.

What This Means For You

How to Set and Crush Your Goals With Way Less Stress

3 SourcesVerywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al.Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the american academy of sleep medicine and sleep research society.Sleep. 2015;38(6):843-844. doi:10.5665/sleep.4716de Witte M, Spruit A, van Hooren S, Moonen X, Stams G-J.Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: A systematic review and two meta-analyses.Health Psychol Rev. 2020;14(2):294-324. doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1627897Goh J, Pfeffer J, Zenios S.Exposure to harmful workplace practices could account for inequality in life spans across different demographic groups.Health Aff. 2015;34(10):1761-1768. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0022

3 Sources

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al.Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the american academy of sleep medicine and sleep research society.Sleep. 2015;38(6):843-844. doi:10.5665/sleep.4716de Witte M, Spruit A, van Hooren S, Moonen X, Stams G-J.Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: A systematic review and two meta-analyses.Health Psychol Rev. 2020;14(2):294-324. doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1627897Goh J, Pfeffer J, Zenios S.Exposure to harmful workplace practices could account for inequality in life spans across different demographic groups.Health Aff. 2015;34(10):1761-1768. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0022

Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al.Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the american academy of sleep medicine and sleep research society.Sleep. 2015;38(6):843-844. doi:10.5665/sleep.4716de Witte M, Spruit A, van Hooren S, Moonen X, Stams G-J.Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: A systematic review and two meta-analyses.Health Psychol Rev. 2020;14(2):294-324. doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1627897Goh J, Pfeffer J, Zenios S.Exposure to harmful workplace practices could account for inequality in life spans across different demographic groups.Health Aff. 2015;34(10):1761-1768. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0022

de Witte M, Spruit A, van Hooren S, Moonen X, Stams G-J.Effects of music interventions on stress-related outcomes: A systematic review and two meta-analyses.Health Psychol Rev. 2020;14(2):294-324. doi:10.1080/17437199.2019.1627897

Goh J, Pfeffer J, Zenios S.Exposure to harmful workplace practices could account for inequality in life spans across different demographic groups.Health Aff. 2015;34(10):1761-1768. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0022

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What This Means For You#

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What This Means For You