Mental and physical health are both vitally important in the workplace. In order to do the job required of you, you need a sound body and mind. The more fast paced the working environment that you enter into, the more difficult it can be to manage your stress levels. In this post, we’ll take a detailed look at how you can manage your stress levels in high paced employment positions. To do so, we’ll take a specific look at one particularly high paced employment positions: financial trading.

Stress Levels in the Workplace: Why Limit Stress and How?

Firstly, it’s important to realise that a degree of workplace stress is normal. However, excess stress can harm your performance, as well as your physical and emotional health. If you’re dealing with stress, your productivity and performance can be adversely affected, meaning that it can be the difference between success and failure.

Of course, you can’t control everything within the work environment, but you can take steps to help protect yourself when difficult situations arise.

Mind have a great guide on how you can manage stress, which is available here. The Government’s Health and Safety Executive also have an equally good guide, here. However, most of these speak quite generally without specific examples. To look specifically at high paced employment positions, we’ll zone in on one particular career: financial trading.

Looking at Finance: Lowering Stress in a Faced Paced Environment

Get a broker that’s on your side – As a lone trader, your broker will be your best friend. You need one that works for you. If you’re continually worrying about fees, charges and capital risk, you’ll be crushed by worries, anxiety and stress. To limit this, look at something like share dealing with IG. This way, you’ll know all your fees are low and transparent, saving you the stress.

Select a platform that works for you – You’ll also need to carefully select a trading platform. The cheapest isn’t always the best. You need one with functionality that matches your ability and gives you exactly what you need. Try a number of different demo accounts before you settle on one and see which you think is best. This way, you won’t have to worry about functionality, look around for how things work and there won’t be any confusion about how to execute trades when the time comes.

Select a work-life balance… and stick to it – Thirdly, once you’re all set up and ready to trade, you need to ensure that trading doesn’t take over your life. You need to decide what your work-life balance will be. Then, you have to stick to it. If you’re trading on a part time schedule, you need to ensure your evenings and nights aren’t dominated. Family time and sleep are vitally important and you need to be happy and well rested to make the right decisions. Allocate a set amount of time per night to trading and never exceed it.

Devote your time to research – Finally, after you’ve begun trading, you need to continue to learn and improve. You need to continue learning as a trader to ensure that you reach your full potential. In continuing to research and learn about the markets, you’ll find it simpler to spot patterns and execute trades effectively. As a result, you’ll limit stress by trading more successfully more often.

To conclude, dealing with stress in the workplace is unbelievably important; especially so in fast paced jobs like financial trading. Stress can be the difference between a clarity of mind where you make rational and sound trading decisions and an unclear mind which makes basic mistakes, potentially costing large sums of money. By following the above advice, you should be able to limit the impacts of stress, leaving you free to trade.