Top Tips for Reducing Stress: Strategies That Actually Help

21.03.21

In Part One of this series, we explored why stress occurs and the circumstances that commonly contribute to it. In Part Two, we looked at the emotional, mental, behavioural, physical, workplace, and relationship signs that stress may be building.

But once you recognise that stress is affecting you, the next question is often:

How do you reduce your stress?

Unfortunately, being told to “just relax” is almost never helpful. When your mind and body have been operating under pressure (sometimes for weeks or even months), stress cannot always be switched off on command. Reducing it may involve a multi-pronged approach.

The good news is you do not necessarily need to overhaul your entire life. Small, realistic changes can begin to interrupt the stress cycle and help life feel more manageable. Here are 10 places to start with managing your stress.

1. Calm Your Immediate Stress Response

When you are highly stressed, it can be difficult to think clearly or decide what to do next. Beginning with your body can help create enough space to respond more deliberately.

Slow your breathing

Stress can make breathing faster and shallower. Taking slow, deep breaths activates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping signal to your body that the immediate threat has passed.

To start, try breathing in gently, then allowing your out-breath to be slow and unforced. The goal is not to breathe perfectly or force yourself to feel calm, but to gradually reduce your level of physiological activation.

There are several ways of using breathing to help manage stress. If you’re curious, you might want to learn a breathing exercise.

Ground yourself in the present

Stress pulls your attention towards future problems, unfinished tasks, or conversations you continue replaying.

Grounding redirects your attention towards what is happening around you now. This helps reduce the amount of information flowing through your mind, helping reduce your in-the-moment stress.

Try:

The ‘Five Things’ exercise: Name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. As you name them, really notice each of the things.
Drop your anchor: Press your feet into the floor, notice how solid it is beneath you. Push different parts of your feet into the ground (toes, heels, whole foot) and notice which different muscles are activated.
Count colours: Name all the green things you can see. Then all the blue things, and then red.

Pause before reacting

The stress response can create an urge to act immediately: send the email, make the phone call, work faster, or resolve everything at once.

When possible, briefly step away before responding. Make a drink, take a short walk, have a shower, or listen to a familiar song. This is not about avoiding the problem. It gives your nervous system time to settle so that your next action is more likely to help.

2. Reassess the Demands You Are Placing on Yourself

In Part One, we described stress as the relationship between the demands you perceive and the resources you believe you have available to meet them. Importantly, both sides of this equation involve perception.

When you feel overwhelmed, ask yourself:

Does this need to be done now?
Is this genuinely my responsibility?
Does it need to be completed to this standard?
What would “good enough” look like?
Am I treating every task as equally urgent?
Do I have support or resources I have not yet considered?

This is not about pretending that genuine pressures are unimportant. Rather, it helps separate unavoidable demands from urgency, responsibility, or standards that you may have unintentionally added.

Stress can narrow your attention so that the immediate problem feels disproportionately significant. Taking a broader view can help you decide what actually deserves your energy.

3. Reduce the Load Where You Can

Sometimes stress is not primarily caused by how you think about your responsibilities. There may simply be too many of them.

Review what is currently on your plate and consider whether anything can be:

Postponed
Declined
Delegated (see point 6!)
Shared with someone else
Completed less thoroughly
Removed altogether

This may mean saying no to an invitation, asking someone to research their own problem, reducing a family commitment, or delaying a non-urgent project. If an opportunity presents that sounds great but isn’t feasible to commit to, don’t say yes.

Not every demand can be reduced, particularly when stress is connected to finances, health, caring responsibilities, or circumstances beyond your control. However, even a small reduction in the overall load can create more room for the responsibilities that cannot be changed.

4. Let “Good Enough” Be Enough

Perfectionism can multiply stress by increasing the amount of time, thought, and energy required for ordinary tasks.

Before beginning something, consider the outcome that is actually needed. A routine email may need to be clear rather than perfectly worded. Dinner may need to be easy rather than Insta-worthy. A household task may need to be completed adequately rather than impeccably.

You may also need to notice when you are continuing to refine, check, or improve something beyond the point where it meaningfully changes the outcome.

Allowing something to be good enough is not the same as becoming careless. It involves matching your effort to the importance of the task, rather than approaching every responsibility as though it requires your absolute best.

5. Create Clearer Boundaries

Stress often becomes more persistent when work, study, or other responsibilities extend into every part of the day.

Consider establishing clearer boundaries around when you are available and when you have finished. This might involve:

Choosing a realistic time to stop work (and sticking to it)
Turning off non-essential notifications
Keeping work emails off your personal phone
Avoiding work during meals or family time
Communicating when you do not have capacity
Clarifying what does and does not fall within your role
Creating a ‘boundary ritual’ – something that you do to mark the end of one role and beginning of enough. For example, playing a particular song, or changing clothes to signal you’ve finished your work day and are transitioning back into your personal life.

Boundaries can initially feel uncomfortable, particularly if you are accustomed to being highly responsive or responsible for others. You may worry about disappointing someone or appearing less committed.

However, remaining constantly available can leave little opportunity to recover, making it harder to sustain your responsibilities over time.

6. Delegate and Ask for Help

Stress can increase when you assume that you must personally manage every task or solve every problem.

Consider where your time and skills are most valuable, and whether someone else could complete part of the work. This may involve sharing household responsibilities, outsourcing a task where financially possible, asking a colleague for assistance, or encouraging another person to take responsibility for something within their control.

Delegating can be difficult if you worry that others will not complete a task in the same way you would. It may also involve accepting an outcome that differs from your preferred approach. You may need to learn to tolerate some guilt in the short term while you get used to practicing delegation.

The aim is not to avoid responsibility, but to use your limited time and energy more deliberately.

7. Protect the Foundations of Wellbeing

When life becomes demanding, basic needs are often the first things to be neglected. You may skip meals, drink less water, stop moving, spend less time outside, or sacrifice sleep to complete more tasks.

These foundations will not remove the source of stress, but neglecting them can reduce the physical and mental resources you have available to cope.

During stressful periods, focus on what is realistic rather than optimal:

Eat regular and sufficiently nourishing meals
Drink water throughout the day
Maintain a consistent sleep schedule where possible
Spend some time in natural light
Move your body in ways that feel manageable
Attend necessary health appointments

The goal is not to create another demand in the form of an intensive self-care routine. It is to protect basic self-care that supports your capacity.

8. Make Your Breaks Genuinely Restorative

Not every activity that distracts you from stress helps you recover from it.

Scrolling, television, or other passive activities can be automatic or enjoyable, but most people finish them feeling just as depleted as before. Consider what helps you feel more settled, connected, or restored afterwards.

This could include:

Going for a walk or spending time outside
Taking an uninterrupted shower
Seeing a supportive friend
Doing something creative
Listening to music
Reading
Resting without also checking your phone
Engaging in an activity that absorbs your attention

You do not need a full day off for rest to be worthwhile. Brief periods of genuine disengagement can also help break up sustained stress.

9. Use Small Moments to Reset

When life is busy, waiting for the perfect opportunity to relax may mean that recovery never happens.

Look for brief moments between tasks when you can intentionally pause. You might take several slow breaths while the kettle boils, stretch after a meeting, step outside for a minute, or wait for 20 seconds before automatically reaching for your phone.

These small resets are not a substitute for addressing an excessive workload or unsustainable circumstances. However, they can prevent stress from remaining at the same intensity throughout the entire day.

Mindfulness can also help you notice when your attention has become caught in future demands or past problems. This does not require clearing your mind. It simply involves returning your attention to what is happening in the present moment.

10. Remember That Stress Is Not Always an Individual Problem

Stress-management advice can sometimes imply that you should be able to breathe, organise, or think your way out of any situation.

However, some stress is a reasonable response to genuinely difficult circumstances. Unsafe workplaces, financial insecurity, discrimination, excessive workloads, inadequate support, chronic illness, and demanding caring responsibilities cannot always be solved through individual coping strategies.

You are not failing because relaxation techniques have not fixed a situation that continues to place excessive pressure on you.

Where possible, reducing stress may require practical or systemic changes: seeking workplace support, accessing financial or community services, sharing caring responsibilities, obtaining medical assistance, or reconsidering demands that have become unsustainable.

When Should You Seek Professional Support for Stress?

There are several signs that stress has become a problem. Consider speaking with a psychologist if stress remains persistent, feels difficult to manage, or continues to affect your health, relationships, work, or daily functioning.

A psychologist can help you:

Understand what is contributing to your stress
Identify patterns that may be maintaining it
Clarify what can and cannot be changed
Reconsider perfectionistic or unrealistic expectations
Strengthen boundaries and communication
Develop strategies for regulating the stress response
Work through barriers to asking for help or reducing demands
Make decisions that are more consistent with your values and capacity

Therapy approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and mindfulness-based therapies may be used depending on your needs and circumstances.

How Can Peaceful Mind Psychology Help?

Our Melbourne psychologists support people experiencing stress, including workplace stress, parenting stress, adjustment to change, burnout, relationship strain, and other forms of ongoing pressure.

Therapy can help you develop practical ways to reduce stress while also addressing the circumstances, expectations, and patterns that may be keeping it going. Accessing telehealth therapy may also make attending sessions easier around a packed schedule.

You do not need to wait until you reach burnout or crisis before seeking support.

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If you’d like to read more about managing stress, we highly recommend Emily and Amelia’s Nagoski’s book Burnout, which is a fantastic deep dive into modern stress and how to manage it. If you don’t have time to read a book, you can hear the gist explained in this podcast. We also have a whole section of articles on stress and anxiety you can check out.